LA VILLA MAROC A MOGADOR. COTE SUD N°; 14 avril mai 94 Reportage : Chris O'Byrne. Photos : Bertrand Touillon. S 'il respecte scrupuleusement l'architecture des riads, il renove completement l'interieur, sanitaires, carrelages, et chambres, puis amenage l'endroit comme sa propre maison, avec ce sens du confort tres britannique. James y associe la sobriete des meubles en maconnerie, volee a l'Espagne du Sud ou il habite, les couleurs du Maroc et le charme de la vieille europe. Face au port, a deux pas du brouhaha ininterrompu de la medina, derriere la lourde porte bleue cloutee, l'atmosphere sereine et familiale qui regne a l'interieur. Sur trois niveaux, la Villa Maroc vit completement sur elle-meme autour de ses deux patios –l'un austere et monacal, melant la pierre et la chaux; l'autre souriant et gai, tache de bleu Klein-, depuis la balustrade qui ceinture les coursives, jusqu'aux volets qui preservent l'intimite des chambres ou aux enormes poteries d'ou jaillissent les bougainvilliers qui s'enroulent autour des colonnes. Passe la reception, des escaliers etroits et secrets menent aux etages. Les salons, la salle a manger et la cuisine sont loges au premier tandis que les chambres, toutes avec salles d'eau privees courent autour des patios. Au dernier etage, la terrasse gansee de pilastres blanchis a chaux domine le port et la baie. Carrelages patines a l'ancienne, zelliges dans les salles de bains, tables incrustees de citronnier ou simplement en bois blanc, meubles marocains anciens et miroirs baroques cohabitent harmonieusement. James Whaley a confie a gerance de l'hotel a Annie et Alain. Ce couple originaire de Toulouse, totalement acquis a Essaouira, dirige l'hotel comme sa maison, avec foi et chaleur. Le service y est accueillant et chaleureux, les menus (plat unique chaque jour) bien penses, la maison agreablement tenue et fleurie du mimosa qui envahit les bois voisins la saison venue. Le soir, les hotes peuvent reserver une table pour un de ces diners amoureusement mijotes par Mina, une douce souirie (habitante d'Essaouira). Elle vous servira sa delicieuse cuisine dans une vaisselle de terre cuite emaillee typique de Safi, la ville voisine reputee pour ses potiers. Enfin si les salles de bains peuvent sembler sommaires a certains et si quelques details meriteraient d'etre revus, la Villa Maroc, arrangee avec gout et ostentation, n'en demeure pas moins une etape de charme et une halte magique. Eclaire par une immense verriere, le patio du premier ryad, austere mele la chaux et la pierre. Une rampe en fer forge court autour du puit de lumiere. C’est a ce niveau que se situent les salons et la salle a manger. CHELSEA MEETS MORROCO. Evening standard – Monday, 27 October 1997 J ade Jagger loved it, Bob Geldof wanted to buy it… and once it was a brothel. MARCUS SCRIVEN discovers a north African hotel with the stamp of style. Its bedroom have no air conditioning, telephones or television; you will search in vain for the mini-bar or the monogrammed dressing gown of any of the fripperies considered essential by the soi-disant great hotels of the world. If you take a shower (and it is most unlikely that your room will have a bath), the hot water system may prove capricious, a thin jet rather than a steady torrent issuing from the shower-head. Yet for its lack of luxuries, the hotel Villa Maroc in Essaouira - on the Atlantic coast, two hours west of Marrakech - has developed an unshakeable hold on a former ambassador to Morocco, as well as jade Jagger, various recherche London honeymooners and even the odd grown-up American. The beautiful hotel wrote Jade at the end of her stay (her use of the definite article indicating that she had perhaps dwelt too long amid the resinous scent of the thuya wood which drifts from workshops beneath the town's crenellated battlements) Bob Geldof evidently shred jade's sentiments, expressing interest in buying the Villa when it was put for sale last year by James Whaley, the Englishman who founded and furnished it. To an extent, The Villa Maroc is Morocco meats Chelsea. That might suggest a dispiriting melange of sexagonal lanterns and Colefax and Fowler; the reality is stunningly better. For a start, the hotel does not stamp itself on Essaouira; to find it you have to leave your car or taxi just inside the town's ochre-pink walls, walk through an arch by a clock tower, then turn left along a high-walled, mud-floored alley, typical of the arteries which tread trough the medina (or old town). Even then, if it were not for a small white sign (easily missed) you might never know that the villa was there –quite unlike the Hotel des Iles (apparently favoured by Yusuf Islam, who used to be Cat Stevens), a good, comfortable establishment with a pool, but one whose thirties-barracks architecture sits grumpily aloof on the seafront. Whaley was infinitely more deferential to his surroundings, combinating two adjacent high-walled old medina houses –each built around a courtyard- whose rooms had been servicing appetites for generations (the villa had a long and honourable history as a brothel) to form the hotel. When decorating it, he largely adopted Arabic idiom, resisting the temptation to cover walls with gentle watercolours (Moroccan creativity is not expressed in painting but filigree carving or mosaic art). So, instead, he unearthed old maps and photographs, tracing Essaouira's development as a trading port, then known as Mogador, with which the Portuguese made contact four centuries ago. The British –mainly Mancunian merchants- arrived three centuries later, by which time the town had been redesigned by a (captive)French engineer. Long inured to foreigners and their ways, the people of Essaouira are among the most relaxed in Morocco. Sauntering through the medina, glancing up the blue shutters or through open doors, you can persuade yourself that they live in houses not that dissimilar to the Villa. This not quite true, of course. In the Villa's white washed bedrooms –each one a different size and shape- there are bedside lamps which you can actually read by instead of the pitifully fancy things ( so often favoured by smart hotels) doing little more than throwing out a dim pool of light which vaguely shows the outline of a bed. There are handsome writing tables and comfortable chairs which you yearn to take home with you, all made from thuya ( a remarkably varied wood with a light, speckled root; the remainder of a darker, smoother grain)in the workshop beneath the battlement. A curtain separates the adjoining bath (or shower) room, invariably decorated with mosaic tiles. These are rooms you could happily live for months, not just for a day or two. There is no dining room, breakfast and dinner being served wherever you choose, breakfast perhaps, on the blue balustrated roof terrace which looks out to the harbour, the gulls, the grills and ramparts (on which Orson Welles filmed his Othello), and from where the beach ebbs away into the distance almost endless curves. For dinner, you stay inside: though the skies above Essaouira are often clear, the town is not blessed by the sun in the way that much Morocco is, being cooled by the winds, frequently strong, which blows in off the Atlantic. But you will probably wander up to the terrace beforehand. The town seems timeless in the half- light: there are no cars near the hotel, the only traffic being Essaouirans on foot, returning from the spice souk, or market, the women, invariably veiled, seemingly silent in their all enveloped haiks, the men more voluble, deal- making on the move. Occasionally, a bulbous-fronted lorry chunters down to the harbour. Inside the Vila, the atmosphere is relaxed, sometimes almost skittish, as if the grown-ups of the house had gone out for the evening leaving their teenage children in charge. The kitchen emits laughter and the occasional cooked fish and the inevitable tajine. Whaley sold the hotel last year. By then, though, he had shown that r...

After lingering in this multi-faceted muslim town, one falls into a reverie when entering the hammam, or Turkish steam baths. Coming from the bustling and dusty medina into the labyrinthine passages of this oasis, with its gentle ambiance and the comforting warmth of its flowing waters, one dreams that this indeed must be Sheherezade’s paradise on earth.

A l'interieur des remparts d 'Essaouira, etonnante cite balneaire de la cote atlantique, carrefour de rencontres artistiques, seul endroit tempere du Maroc, la Villa Maroc, hotel de charme du XVIIIe, enchante parce que c'est exactement l'endroit dont on reve : simple, accueillant, beau et juste. Tariffs and Reservation. Franzosische version

A different taste of Morocco. At the hotel Villa Maroc in the medina of Essaouira, one feels at home, in a world of simplicity and warmth, where gentle pleasures are enhanced by the flavours of ancestral family cooking, updated by the lady of the house. Discover our recipe.