A house that keeps its grandeur inside
Riad Fès gives almost nothing away from the lane. Like every great house of the old city it turns a plain wall to the street and saves what it has for the courtyards within. You step through a low door, the noise of the medina drops behind you, and you are standing in an Andalusian patio with carved plaster climbing the walls and a fountain marking the centre of it.
It is not one house but several. Old Fassi palace homes were bought up one by one and stitched together over years of patient work, their galleries and salons repaired rather than replaced. The craftsmen who did it still cut the tile and carve the plaster by hand, the way they always have in this city, and the care reads in every panel. It belongs to Relais & Châteaux now, though the first thing you notice is not the grade but the quiet.
Rooms across the joined houses
Around thirty rooms and suites are spread across the houses, so no two feel quite alike. Some turn inward to the patios and the sound of the fountain; the grandest climb towards the rooftop and the city. Carved headboards, zellij underfoot, cedar shutters on tall windows. The old plan was kept, and the rooms were fitted to it rather than the other way round.
Then come the surprises a house this old has no business holding. A fourteen-metre pool, given a clean contemporary line by the French designer Christophe Pillet, sits where you would expect another shaded court. The spa is run with Cinq Mondes and marocMaroc, with a hammam for the end of a long day in the souks. None of it shouts over the plaster and the tile.
From the roof the old city turns from ochre to grey, and the call to prayer comes up from every minaret at once.
Two kitchens and a roof
Dinner is served at Gayza, where the kitchen works between Morocco and France, and again up on the rooftop, which may be the finest seat in the medina at dusk. Fès has long thought of itself as the country's culinary capital, and the cooking stays close to that. A proper pigeon pastilla, slow tagines, then lighter plates for anyone who has walked the souks all afternoon and wants only a little. Gayza Le Bar pours a floor below.
The rooftop is the thing people come back for. The medina spreads out under it, the hills close the far side, and the light goes slowly before the lamps come on in the courtyards beneath you.
Fès has grand riads and it has polished hotels. Few hold both the craft and the calm of this one, because the restoration set out to repair the old palace rather than reinvent it, and the plaster and tile were left to the hands that have always cut them. Take a room on the upper floor, wake to the medina, and one of the world's great medieval cities is a staircase away.
VANE note. This is a researched profile, not yet a first-hand VANE verdict. A full review carries a stay date, an independence disclosure and our own account of the house. Photos: Riad Fès, with credit.
