Dar Saïd

Sidi Bou Saïd is the village every visitor to Tunisia photographs, a cliff of whitewash and cobalt shutters above the Gulf of Tunis, cafés on the steps and the sea laid out below. Dar Saïd sits in the middle of it, behind a plain door in a lane. Inside is a restored nineteenth-century dar, the courtyard house that Tunis built for shade and privacy, opened in 2001 as one of the country's first boutique hotels. Twenty-three rooms and suites turn inward around four courtyards. Nineteenth-century European furniture stands against Tunisian tilework and carved plaster, and a few rooms keep their four-poster beds. In the heat of the afternoon the courtyards hold their cool and the crowds in the lanes do not reach in.

The table

Breakfast is the meal the house makes its own. It is bought from the market that morning and carried to wherever you want it, the garden or a table by the pool that looks north over the gulf. Dinner is a short walk across the lane at Dar Zarrouk, the hotel's restaurant, whose terrace opens over the water and whose kitchen has cooked for Sidi Bou Saïd for years. You can charge it back to the room. There is a hammam in the Ottoman manner for the end of a long day on foot.

Why it's in VANE

Sidi Bou Saïd fills by day and empties by evening, and Dar Saïd is on the right side of that exchange. Stay the night and the village settles around you. The call to prayer carries over the rooftops, and after dark the lights of La Marsa trace the bay. The hotel sits above the sea rather than on it, and the pool is small. You do not come for either. You come for the house and the village around it, both kept with care and little fuss, ten minutes from the ruins of Carthage and twenty from the medina of Tunis.

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