Royal Mansour, Marrakech, Morocco · North Africa

The land on which Royal Mansour now stands had long belonged to the royal domain. When King Mohammed VI decided to build there, he wanted a place to receive heads of state and visiting royalty in a manner distinctly Moroccan, one that could only have been built here, by people who had known how for centuries. OBMI was asked to conceive a residence of hospitality hors classe across 3.3 hectares within the medina, discreet within a city of a million people. Morocco's artisanal heritage of carved plasterwork, hand-cut zellige, cedar joinery and wrought ironwork had developed over centuries in the hands of specialist craftsmen, and the brief was to make that craft structural to Royal Mansour without flattening it into decoration.

A riad is a private house organised around a central courtyard, turned inward, built to hold a household across every season and every shift of light and temperature the year brings. Carrying that typology into hospitality meant preserving its internal logic (the slow approach from entrance to courtyard, the threshold between private and semi-private space, the hush of birdsong and water a courtyard holds) while meeting the operational demands of a hotel of this scale.

Each riad is a house in itself, three storeys turned around a private courtyard, with a plunge pool, a rooftop terrace, and a canopy overhead that closes on its own when rain begins. Staff arrive unseen from the tunnels below. A guest can dine across the property or never leave the riad at all; either way the medina stays audible somewhere past the walls, present and never quite entering.

Royal Mansour opened in 2010, received privately for some years before it opened to guests. When the first reviews came, they shared a difficulty: the building was hard to place in time. The depth of the carving, the close-set zellige, the joinery of the cedar screens all read as the work of an older Morocco. This was the decision made at the outset showing through in the finished fabric, the project built to demonstrate and honour Morocco’s craft.