CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN’S HIDDEN GEMS
Everything from the designer’s shoes to his private spaces is shaped in some ways by his love for Egypt. When he has guests in Luxor, where he has a home, he takes them to the Marsam restaurant at the back of the Colossi of Memnon site. “It’s a pure oasis of freshness and quietness where they serve delicious mezze, and the view on Memnon is a bliss,” he says. He also advises taking in the Ramesseum temple site at sunset, when it is “particularly beautiful.” Elsewhere in the country, he loves to visit the desert oasis of Siwa, “one of the most charming places in Egypt,” recommending the ecoresort Adrère Amellal there, and in Cairo he always visits the Gayer-Anderson Museum, “a 17thcentury construction filled with treasures, which used to be the home of a British Royal Army doctor and amateur Egyptologist” in the 1930s and ’40s.