THE SECRET OF THE SOUK
An Italian’s dream of a little riad in Marrakech grows into an idiosyncratic artist-designed palace.
The souk in Marrakech is full of secrets. It’s a warren of dusty, rustred walls, mostly six feet high or more, concealing the courtyards and buildings within from the prying eyes of anyone wandering down the narrow lanes. Restaurants, shops and cafes appear, almost conjured, from nowhere. A small sign might be the only evidence from the street, but duck through the door, and there’s a wonderland within. Nothing, though, suggests the presence of a vast complex hidden at the medina’s heart, in the neighborhood of Dar El Bacha: a riad that is one of the largest private homes in the city, other than the king’s palaces. It’s fitting, then, that the owner named his estate the Secret.
The nine-bedroom, 14-bathroom mansion has been a passion project for the owner, an Italian businessman who has lived across the world during his long career but now considers Marrakech home and resides full-time inthe 23,680-square-foot riad, with its 17,000 square feet of terraces and gardens. The idea behind the sprawling property was simple: He wanted to create a haven for his family and a true feeling of permanence for the first time. He has particularly prized the estate throughout the pandemic, when it’s been an oasis he’s rarely left.
It was the late 1990s when the owner, then newly remarried and a little restless, first mooted the move. He was living with hiswife,fromwhom he is nowdivorced, inLosAngelesand was far from content with the SoCal lifestyle. Why not decamp to Marrakech, a place he’d loved for more than a decade? He had first visited the Moroccan city in the early 1980s and returned frequently. It was only as his real-estate venture evolved that he gradually realized he could actually make it his primary base.
The first challenge was finding an ideal site, so he tasked a local friend with hunting for a good property. That ch um quickly showed him alittle house, a2,150-square-foot riad, that classic of Moroccan architecture, a home ranged around a central courtyard with a cooling fountain. “It was just for fun,” the Italian recalls, then pauses to laugh. “And then I lost control of myself.” Eighteen months later, he completed his buying spree, having accrued a total of 21 adjacent riads at breakneck speed. He had a vision, agrand plan, for the huge parcel of land so aggressively assembled: Demolish the structures, many of which were beyond repair, and then hire Morocco’s superb local craftsmen to construct a sprawling villa for him. The catch: Those craftsmen worked exclusively by hand. But as a newcomer, he felt it was