El Fenn

Vanessa Branson and Howell James took on the first riad more than twenty years ago, opened in 2004, and worked with the Marrakech architect Amine Kabbaj to make it hold together. They did not stop at one. Over the years the house annexed the buildings around it, so the address you check into now is really several old riads joined at the hip, running to forty-one rooms and suites with no two the same. You feel the seams. A corridor turns where a party wall used to be, a courtyard opens where you expected another room, and the numbering follows a logic only the building understands.

None of it announces itself from the street. The door on Derb Moullay Abdullah Ben Hussain is the plainest thing about the place, which is the point. Marrakech keeps its wealth turned inwards, behind blank walls and around courtyards, and El Fenn honours that habit rather than fighting it. Cross the threshold and the temperature drops, the noise of the souks falls away, and a family of tortoises has the run of the ground floor. Craft carries the rooms. Hand-carved cedar ceilings, tadelakt polished to a soft sheen, zellige set underfoot, the old Moroccan trades kept in work rather than quoted.

When El Fenn opened, Branson brought pieces from her own collection to hang on the walls, and the practice never stopped. The art here is not bought by the metre to match the cushions. Works by Bridget Riley, William Kentridge, Sir Terry Frost and David Shrigley have hung in the public rooms and the bedrooms, rehung and added to over the years, and they are the reason a corridor rewards a slow walk. The same year the house opened, Branson co-founded the Marrakech Biennale, which ran for six editions until 2016; the hotel and the city's contemporary art scene grew up in the same rooms.

Colour is applied with the same nerve. Hot pink runs into teal, a lime-plastered wall carries a framed portrait, ochre meets a green row of ceramics, and none of it is toned down for a nervous guest. It should be too much. It is not, because the palette sits on real craft and real pictures rather than on paint alone, and because the light coming through the stained glass keeps shifting it through the day. Branson's eye still sets the register, and the register is confidence.

Most of the life of the house happens above it. The roof terrace runs to thirteen hundred square metres, which is a great deal of open air to hold this deep in the medina, and it carries one of the three pools, a restaurant and a cocktail bar. Two restaurants and two bars work the property in all, the cooking Moroccan with a Mediterranean lean, unfussy and generous. Lunch runs long under the striped parasols. Dinner arrives by lantern light with the medina laid out below and the Koutoubia minaret close enough to set your bearings by.

The rooftop bar is one of the better sundowner perches in Marrakech, and it knows it. As the light goes the minaret turns gold, the call to prayer rises over the rooftops, and the terrace fills with a sociable, unhurried crowd. This is not a silent, staff-you-never-see kind of hotel, and it does not pretend to be. It is a house that likes company, and it is the better for being sure of what it is. Condé Nast has put it on the Gold List in 2017, 2021, 2022 and 2024, which is a long time to keep the same room this full.