Riad Fès

Riad Fès gives little away from the lane. Like every great house in the old city it turns its back on the street and keeps its grandeur for the courtyards within. Step through and the medina falls quiet. Carved plasterwork climbs the walls of an Andalusian patio, cedar doors open onto cool rooms floored in zellij, and a fountain marks the centre of it all. The riad is not one house but several old palace homes stitched together over years of restoration, their galleries and salons kept by Fassi craftsmen who still cut tile and carve plaster by hand. Thirty rooms and suites are spread across them, some turned inward to the patios, the grandest giving onto the rooftop and the city.

The table

Dinner is served at Gayza, where the kitchen works between Morocco and France, and again on the rooftop, which may be the finest seat in the medina at dusk. From up there the old city turns from ochre to grey and the call to prayer rises from the minarets across it. The cooking stays close to Fès, a city that considers itself the country's culinary capital, so the slow tagines and a proper pigeon pastilla sit beside lighter plates for anyone who has spent the day in the souks. Gayza Le Bar pours below.

Why it's in VANE

Fès has grand riads and it has polished hotels, but few hold both the craft and the calm of this one. The restoration treated the old palace as something to repair rather than reinvent, and it shows in the plaster, the tile and the painted cedar. There is a serious spa run with Cinq Mondes, and a cool fourteen-metre pool by the designer Christophe Pillet that comes as a surprise in a house this old. Take a suite on the upper floor, wake to the medina, and one of the world's great medieval cities is a staircase away.

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