A house of light in the medina

Riad Dar Nour is a house of eight rooms and suites in the old medina of Marrakech, a few minutes from the Mouassine fountain and the souks. Behind an unmarked cedar door, a bent passage opens into a courtyard of green zellige, four orange trees and a small plunge pool, with two storeys of carved galleries rising around it and a roof terrace above the medina.

The house was built for a cloth merchant in the late nineteenth century and restored over three years by craftsmen from Marrakech and Fès: tadelakt plaster burnished by hand, zellige cut tile by tile, cedar ceilings repainted from the fragments that survived. Every room is different, and every one keeps the quiet that thick riad walls were built to give.

We run it the old way — a small team, breakfast in the courtyard, a private hammam, dinner on the roof by lantern light — and the new way where it matters: good beds, hot water, fast Wi-Fi, and a driver who will meet your flight. Come for the medina; stay for the light.