For design
El Fenn
Marrakech · Morocco
Behind a plain door in the Bab El Ksour quarter of the medina, El Fenn opens into colour. Hot pink gives way to teal, a working art collection hangs on lime-plastered walls, and the roof terrace keeps the Koutoubia minaret in its sights.
El Fenn began as one riad and kept absorbing its neighbours, so the place now runs as a warren of courtyards stitched together, with 41 rooms and suites and no two the same. Vanessa Branson started it more than twenty years ago and her eye still sets the tone: mid-century European furniture beside hand-carved cedar ceilings, camel-leather floors, tadelakt polished to a sheen, zellige underfoot. Colour is the house language and it is applied without apology. The art is not decoration bought by the metre but a real collection, added to and rehung over the years, and it is the reason the corridors reward a slow walk. Three pools cool the courtyards, and a family of tortoises has the run of the ground floor.
The kitchen works across two restaurants and two bars, most memorably on the 1,300 square-metre roof, where lunch runs long under striped parasols and dinner arrives by lantern light with the medina laid out below. The cooking is Moroccan with a Mediterranean lean, unfussy and generous. The rooftop bar is one of the better sundowner perches in the city, the minaret turning gold as the call to prayer goes up. It is a sociable address rather than a silent one, and the better for knowing what it is.
Marrakech has grander hotels and quieter ones, palace-scale riads with staff you never see. El Fenn is neither hushed nor humble. It is an independent house with a point of view, run for two decades on colour, craft and a serious love of art, five minutes on foot from Jemaa el-Fna yet sealed off from the noise the moment the door shuts. Take a room on the upper floors for the light coming through the stained glass, give the late afternoon to the roof, and let the medina do the rest. Condé Nast has kept it on the Gold List for good reason.
