Villa Maroc
Through the tangle of Essaouira’s medina, the air is warm with leather and spice, and cats doze on faded, sun-bleached carpets. Down a narrow alleyway, the only clue is a great wooden door, worn smooth with age and painted a vivid Yves Klein blue. Step through it and the clamour of the souk falls away. The light dims, the air turns cool, and past a small boutique glinting with Berber silver, a tray of fresh mint tea waits as if you were expected. This is Villa Maroc, often called Morocco’s first riad hotel, and, three decades on, a family institution finding its way into a new generation’s hands.
In the late 1980s, British surfer James Waley fell for Essaouira and took on a single riad in the medina. Mounia Ezzaher‘s parents came a few years later. Her father had known the town since boyhood: the small blue fishing boats rowing in at dusk, light glowing gold over the water. It happened over a conversation in one of its salons: when Ezzaher’s parents asked whether the riad was for sale, the answer came back on a torn scrap of paper, a price pencilled across it. A week later they had signed; two months after that, Villa Maroc was home.
Villa Maroc
Now encompassing four riads, the hotel has just 21 rooms and no two are alike. Each has the intimacy of a home long loved, furnished with antique pieces, worn textiles and original artwork collected over the years. The rooms feel gently out of step with the present: no television screens, only sweet pastries set out in embossed metalware, orange-blossom soap and the call of gulls over the harbour.
Beyond the rooms, the house unfolds slowly: a cool warren of staircases, courtyards and shady corners made for losing an afternoon in. The roof terrace climbs in levels over the ramparts towards the water and palm-fringed coast. The whole riad seems to exhale and wants its guests to do the same. “I want them to feel very in Morocco – like they can take a break,” Ezzaher says. The aim is to show the country in every detail, giving Villa Maroc a spirit entirely its own.
Villa Maroc
Much of that spirit can be attributed to a marriage of two temperaments. Ezzaher’s mother is Swiss, her father Moroccan. “It’s a running joke in the family: Moroccan hospitality and Swiss precision,” she says. Between the two sits a rare kind of ease.
That same duality carries through to the table. Dinner is served around an intimate, candle-lit courtyard, with seats low and drawn close. Each evening brings a different set menu, with no choices to weigh, built on the conviction that Moroccan cooking runs far deeper than the tagine most travellers know. On the night Schön! alive dined, that meant spiced oranges with black olives and garlic, followed by slow-cooked goat, so tender it fell from the bone. Removing the choice, as Ezzaher sees it, allows guests to surrender to the meal, and to meet dishes they would never think to order for themselves.
Domaine Villa Maroc
Much of what is on the table comes from the family’s own acreage. Drive inland, through open, sun-worn country, where wild horses roam free, and the olive groves appear. This is the Domaine, the family’s other life’s work: an olive and argan farm with its own mill. Ezzaher’s mother, unconvinced by the local olive oil, took to travelling with her own bottle from Tuscany; her husband, an engineer with no background in farming, resolved to outdo it. He learned the craft from producers in Spain and Italy. What began as a private project is now a working estate, producing more than 20 tonnes of oil last year, pressed from trees harvested between October and December.
Over time, that pride settled into something quietly principled. Nearly everyone who works the land comes from the surrounding villages. Even the waste closes a loop: the crushed olive stones are dried and burned to heat the pool at Les Jardins, the family’s contemporary sister property nearby. It was never badged as a sustainability drive; it simply made sense.
Left: a wild horse and Right: Mounia Ezzaher and her father, both at Domaine Villa Maroc
Now the story passes onto the next generation. Ezzaher is now General Manager, after her parents stepped back this year with an unhurried handover no manual could capture. She had, she says, “dreamed about taking over since I was a little girl”: not to remake Villa Maroc, but to build gently on what was already here. If anything, she wanted to give the place’s long history its due: there was, she felt, “such a big story to tell”.
In the end, it is the slowness that stays with you. Mint tea that arrives unprompted; the afternoon light pooling in the worn reds of a Berber rug; the call to prayer rising over the medina as evening settles. Villa Maroc has never chased the times, only grown more surely into itself. That, long after the blue door has closed behind you, is what you carry home.
Villa Maroc
Find out more about Villa Maroc here and Domaine Villa Maroc here.
words. Olivia Cichero
edit. Huma Humayun
images. Courtesy of Villa Maroc
