Here’s something I never thought I’d do on a posh weekend in Marrakesh: jostle for space with a donkey cart while cycling in the middle of a medina traffic jam. But this morning, over breakfast at IZZA, the idea of a pedal around the city’s labyrinthine medieval core came up. IZZA is a new, 14-room boutique hotel that has opened near the medina’s northern tip, and one of the social enterprises it supports is Pikala Bikes. As well as training mechanics and providing bicycle delivery services around the city, it offers guided rides for visitors through the alleyways and souks. A half-day tour costs £20pp.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I thought to myself, as I tucked into my avocado toast topped with sun-dried tomatoes and harissa poached eggs. It was 8.30am. The sky was as smooth and serene as a bolt of blue silk, and here, on the rooftop terrace, was obviously the place to look at it, while spinning out another smooth coffee in the shade of the restaurant pergola. Why on earth would I want to leave this sanctuary and go pedalling off into what promised to be near 40C heat? Even the rustling fronds of two palm trees, which rise right through the building from one of its courtyards, seemed to murmur their assent.
“It’s a really successful project,” Mohamed Ait Belhaj, the hotel’s charming manager, told me when I hesitated. “They have 50 full and part-time staff.” Then, when I worried about the heat, he reassured me that much of the cycling would be in the deep shade of the medina’s narrow streets.
My final ploy was to tell him about all the books I wanted to check out in his beautiful library. Set in one of the hotel’s three white courtyards, its floor-to-ceiling shelves are crammed with tempting titles. Mohamed laughed. “You can’t just read about Marrakesh,” he told me. “You have to live it a little as well.”
So here I am, nearly two hours later, in a very Moroccan logjam. It’s not just the donkey cart that’s causing problems. There’s a kind of moped-powered delivery van packed in there too, as well as squadrons of scooters, most of which carry two or three riders. No one’s in a hurry to unpick the problem — we’ve only been stuck here for ten minutes. But it’s rapidly growing more intractable. People are piling into the local shops to buy their ingredients for lunch.
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The Londoner in me starts to twitch impatiently. “Shouldn’t we find another way?” I ask our guide, Yassir el Ferzadeq. A 20-year-old undergraduate, he has a face as untroubled as a sunlit beach. “Give it a minute,” he tells me.
Then there’s a little shuffle in the souk in front of us. Has the old boy up there pulled in his handcart of melons? Whatever the cause, the tension is released, and after a jerky half-start there is sudden motion in every direction, all at once. The cart lurches past us. A woman emerges from behind it with her shopping trolley to forge fearlessly across the alley, while a scooterist, ferrying wife and child, makes a swooping detour into the oncoming traffic to avoid her. Without batting an eyelid the oncoming others swerve to avoid him too, and in doing so they open a gap behind the woman into which Yassir immediately inserts his bike.
The swirling dance of Marrakesh traffic is back on. And who am I to argue with its sense of logic and timing? Essentially, it all boils down to this: whoever made the first move takes precedence. I pedal like a maniac to make it through the same gap as Yassir, before anyone else sees it.
The two hours that follow are halfway between the old-school exoticism of a Michael Palin travelogue and a ski slalom race. En route we visit a bakery where the owner feeds flatbreads into his wood-fired oven from sunrise to sunset, and a mosaicist patiently chipping away at 100,000 thumb-sized ceramic inserts. From start to finish my eyes are out on stalks.
When I get back to IZZA it feels less like a sanctuary and more like a springboard. There are plenty of other ways the hotel opens its doors to the world outside. It helps to fund the Amal cookery school nearby, which aids disadvantaged women in finding paid employment and proper recognition for their work. Out of town, there’s a donkey sanctuary. But what you’ll notice most within the hotel’s walls are its links with the country’s artists and artisans.
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The craftwork is everywhere. No wonder. For anyone who wants to knit seven separate riad houses into a homogenous whole — as IZZA’s architect has done — the living traditions of Morocco’s artisans are a rich and obvious resource. Here they’ve been given an extra sense of purpose by the example of the dissolute 1960s wunderkind of Marrakesh design Bill Willis. Seven years ago IZZA’s owners bought Dar Noujoum, his crumbling house where Yves Saint Laurent, Mick Jagger and Grace Jones were guests, and have been burnishing his reputation ever since. They’ve even made a rather beautiful film of his life (available on Vimeo).
Meanwhile, the brand director San Yetlee has mirrored his attention to detail and shared some of his motifs. So you’ll see long, thin friezes of carved white plasterwork running along the walls — they blossom here and there into ghostly gardens of arabesque motifs, as they do above my enormous bed. Then, in the narrow, winding staircase outside my eye is drawn inexorably upwards, towards the roof terraces, by bands of mosaic fragments (zellige) laid into every riser.
There are visual treats everywhere. Room sizes vary considerably around the courtyards, and include a private apartment as well as a palatial, pinkish suite that doffs its cap towards the 1970s work of Yves Saint Laurent and costs £429 B&B. Right down to the smaller doubles — which start at a very reasonable £138 B&B — there’s an attention to detail and a desire to add texture and interest with ornate wooden doors, gleaming mosaics and Bakelite phones. Even the pillowcase labels are bespoke. Each bears the inscription: “If at noon the king declares it is night, behold the stars.”
I can’t vouch for noon. But I do know that they came out at 2pm after my bike ride. Once I retreated to my air- conditioned room, sleep was instant. I fell asleep again midway through a delicious massage in the hotel’s private hammam that is included in the room rate.
Eventually, the plan is to turn Willis’s Dar Noujoum into a kind of art institute and events space, with residences offered to local and visiting artists. But the hotel is already an arts hub, thanks to the works that adorn almost every wall. Not all of it is Moroccan. Among the artists on show are the Brazilian master of black and white documentary photography Sebastião Salgado and the Ethiopian digital collective Yatreda. Its images recall Salgado’s striking monochrome compositions — until one of the subjects blinks, and you realise that you’re watching a video. The value of the private collection on show is estimated at £5 million.
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From time to time guests will be able to meet some of the artists too, as I do on my final evening at its rooftop restaurant. On the menu tonight is a whole leg of lamb, slow-cooked for six hours and basted continuously for a final 30 minutes. It’s so soft and sweet I’ll eat almost half of it on my own. But first, by way of an hors d’oeuvre, comes a chat with Ismail Zaidy, the 26-year-old creator of Find Your Wings, a digital work that hangs in the lobby. In it, a statuesque young woman — Zaidy’s sister — stands in the golden light of the setting sun, wreathed in fluttering bolts of fabric. The cloth is coloured pink: “the colour of hope”, Zaidy tells me. It was shot on the roof of his family’s home, just as Marrakesh was emerging from the pandemic.
“How long do you plan to keep photographing up there, now your career’s taking off?” I ask. “I’ll never stop,” he says, smiling. “Look around you. What photographer wouldn’t love to have access to this kind of light?”
And what traveller wouldn’t love a view of a city like the one you get at IZZA, I wonder to myself as I follow his gaze into the bottomless blue of the Marrakesh dusk. Long may the Moroccan sun shine on them both.
Sean Newsom was a guest of IZZA, which has B&B doubles from £138, including transfers and massage (izza.com)
Three more design-focused hotels in Marrakesh
By Sarah Turner
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El Fenn
Recently expanded to spread over 13 buildings, this medina hotel owned by Vanessa Branson (Sir Richard’s sister) and her business partner Howell James has 41 rooms, three swimming pools, a hammam, a design shop and a vast roof terrace. The hotel, which has always promoted Moroccan culture, hosts festivals and events, and showcases an extensive art collection. Recently, El Fenn acquired its latest installation, made of recycled food tins by the local artist Hassan Hajjaj. You’ll see it in the Colonnade Cafe, a guest-only restaurant specialising in local cuisine.
Details B&B doubles from £294 (el-fenn.com)
House of Augustine
Opening next month near Dar Moha, five minutes’ walk from the souks, this ten-room hotel is the latest outpost from the design collective House of Augustine. Run by the interior designer Willem Smit, it showcases the work — including fashion, fragrance and furniture — of some of Marrakesh’s finest craftspeople. There’s a gym and a 26ft swimming pool in the courtyard. Rates include dinner on your first night plus all drinks and snacks. There’s a sister property in Tangier, too.
Details Half-board doubles from £236 (houseofaugustine.com)
Riad Jardin Secret
Are you an artist? Then you can apply for a residency at this beautifully restored classic riad — a townhouse with a central courtyard and fountain tucked away on Dar el Bacha. The rest of us will have to pay. With just seven rooms, the hotel is a showcase for Moroccan crafts, filtered through the European aesthetic of the owners, Cyrielle Rigot and Julien Tang. Things are kept simple — there are no televisions in the rooms, nor is there air conditioning, but there are cooling breezes on the beguiling roof terrace.
Details B&B doubles from £156 (riadjardinsecret.com)
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