One of the great beauties of Marrakech is its unexpectedness. Truly, this is a city where intrepidness is rewarded as in no other. And so it is with our hotel of the month, Izza – one of the best riads in Marrakech.
You come off the shop-lined street and turn left down a path, and then right, and then left again (past the kittens in a box), and then right again, this time through a kind of tunnel, all the while thinking to yourself: is it really down here? And then you arrive and discover an extraordinary idyll in the most unexpected of places.
Created out of two very old riads, and a newer building which houses the lobby, Izza is a princely little palace of a hotel, full of imaginative design flourishes and rammed to the rafters with contemporary and digital artworks. It takes its cues from bon viveur and aesthete Bill Willis, an American architect and interior designer who moved to Marrakech in the 1960s and popularised a kind of maximalised Moroccan style, designing houses and villas for the city’s fast-living “freedom seekers”, among them Yves Saint Laurent.
Throughout the hotel, there are nods to Willis’s designs, including a stunning tiled fireplace in the snug little wood-panelled library, and the delightful curios that give the ground-floor hotel bar its eclectic charm. The rooms are similarly wide-ranging in their design. There are 14, each named after one of the hard-playing 70s set (Marianne, Yves, Cecil, etc) and each with its own look. I particularly liked Leila (Alaoui), with its enormous tadelakt (traditional lime-based plaster) bath.
The public spaces are tree-filled and tranquil, with art everywhere you look. Izza runs a rolling artist residency for emerging Moroccan artists, and the hotel’s collection has been curated by combining their work with pieces from a roll call of top international talent, including Turkish artist Refik Anadol and American Tyler Hobbs.
There are two very pretty pools: one unheated, the other decked out in shimmering green tiles and as warm as bath. The handsome in-house spa and hammam offer all kinds of treatments, including Moroccan herbal poultice massages, and there’s a little gym for those who don’t fancy dodging mopeds on their morning run.
The hotel’s trump card, however, is its glorious rooftop restaurant Noujoum, with its discreet hideaways and Sebastião Salgado prints on the wall. The kitchen turns out deeply decadent breakfasts in the morning – m’semen pancakes, say, or eggs royale with saffron hollandaise – while the birds chirrup around you.
And at night, it transforms into an open-air candlelit oasis, the tables heaving with plates of monkfish tagine and grilled octopus, happy guests knocking back glasses of excellent local wine and a sense everywhere that everyone is in on a tremendous little secret.
46 Driba Laarida, Sidi Ahmed, Soussi, Medina 40000, Marrakech, Morocco; izza.com
A special film, Bill Willis – Morocco’s Finest Aesthete, created by Izza with exclusive interviews, can be found at billwillis.com
David Annand is editorial director of Secret Trips
