Claudio Bravo Courtyards

The rooms are all on the ground floor and wend around a series of courtyards. These offer shade and privacy to the rooms but also act in a similar manner to hedges forming "garden rooms" in English garden design. The one adjacent to the main guest room has a large swimming pool.

Others are used to set of his collection of classical statuary.

Some are lavishly furnished with marble garden sets from India;

Some reinvent traditional arabic gardens, although the classical fountain in definitely european.

Others just show off collections of particular plants.

Claudio Bravo interiors.

 Some of the cheaper hotel rooms are in rooms built to accommodate the workmen

 but the rooms in the house proper are sumptuous.Each is based on a single colour. There  are lavish furnishings with furniture inlaid with camel bone

 and antique chests,

 carvings from Mali, 

daybeds from India,

 and lots of graeco-roman statues.

 The main guest suite where Claudio entertained visiting royalty and such -like has a Frances Bacon picture over one of the beds and access to one of the swimming pool 

There are collections of old moroccan pottery and glass

Palais Claudio Bravo

Claudio Bravo was a Chilean Hyper-realist painter. Born in 1936 he lived in Madrid and for a time New York  and painted society portraits for the likes of Franco's family, Charles Forbes and the Marcos family. In 1972 he visited Tangier where he fell in with the ex-patriot circle around Charles Forbes and Paul Bowles, bought a palace there and spent the rest of his life in Morocco. He later bought a palace in Marrakesh and in 2000 the Iranian princess who lives in Taroudant invited him here and he realised how much warmer it was in the winter. He bought a large tract of land north of the town in the Sousse valley,employed 460 workers to build a palace to his design and lived here until his death in 2011.

The palace was completed by 2005 and visiting it now it is difficult to understand that it is a totally modern house as he adapted indigenous architectural memes; but this is a house  which although designed around a series of courtyards giving privacy and shade is designed to look out to the Atlas mountains.

 On his death he left his Marrakeshi palace to the Iranian princess and the Taroundant home to his long term assistant Bashir Tabchich who had come with him from Tangier. In 2015 he opened the palais as a museum displaying Bravo's works and last year it opened as a hotel. With the Gazelle d'Or being closed and the Palais Salaam having a hard time it should do well, although there was no-one staying there when we visited for lunch last Friday.

Tin Mal again.

We took the Cellist and her son, the Doctor, to Tin Mal. The weather was colder than we had experienced it before on the trip, even though there was no snow or ice. We were pleased that when we returned to the cafe for lunch there was a big log fire which we'd never seen before and we ate by it inside  rather than shivering on the terrace. The food was the same though, moroccan salad, berber omelette and fruit. Perfect.
The guide recognised me and said come again but don't wait 2 years next time.
The restoration work had progressed and the plaster on the pillars was stripped back to clearly show the cedar wood inserts to protect them in earthquakes which I don't remember seeing before.

A Return to Tioute

We have friends staying so we took the to Tioute. The bees were buzzing and the birds singing and it was just the right temperature although overcast. No blue skies.

 The campsite was operating but the threatened relocation of the main restaurant hadn't materialised although the smaller ones near the mills appeared to be expecting business and a heron seemed at home in one.

A Hard Prune

The hedge had clearly not been pruned all summer so it had to be reconstructed. Sadly the roses were chopped too so they may not have any flowers until we've left for the summer.

More light

Most of our furnishings were inherited from the frenchman from whom we bought the house. The exception were the sofas in the downstairs morning room. You may recall that the living room had the most uncomfortable western style suite that I complained about but only thought to replace them 2 or 3 years ago. The morning room had little furniture; some local outdoor type rattan sets we use on the terrace and the guest bedroom and lots of pots which we now use outside for plants. So, wishing for comfortable seating I dashed of to KITEA to get some smart western style sofas in what turned out to be faux leather. It was a terrible buy. As imports they were incredibly expensive  by moroccan standards. So much so I had assumed they were real leather. They have got infected by some sort of fungus growing on the surface which is both ugly and causes the top layer of the covering to come off. The smaller of the pair was so bad that it could no longer be concealed by a  throw so we donated it to somebody who was capable of making proper loose covers (the frame and structure was sound) and substituted  a traditional solution of a base and mattress made to measure for the space. We didn't bother getting fitted covers just used the throw and then used it to show off my peacock cushion which I think works quite well.

As it had been made to measure we were able to make it short enough for a table at each end. We kept my mother-in-law's malay brass tray table which her mother had brought back from Malaya when they returned as a small child and widowed mother in the 1920s but commissioned a traditional painted table for the other end which I think looks well although it cost more than twice as much as the new "sofa". 

The room had always had thin turquoise curtains which I quite liked because of the colour at both the windows and arch to the hall. The frenchman or his wife had been very fond of curtains, making holes in the tajliq to have them over the beds and generally over any window. We took down the ones in the living room a couple of years ago when we realised that the poles prevented the windows opening. When we went to the teachers new house I realised that opening the high street windows allowed a draft to come through  and out into the patio and up the central void. Traditional air conditioning built in. 
We have friends coming next week and realised we did not remember ever washing the turquoise curtains so we thought we better had but when they were down there was so much more light in the room we decided not to bother..It's north-facing so you don't have to screen the sun out.
We did need at least one curtain to screen the wash area from the room. We bought a ready made one which was the right colours but the standard 2 m length which is about 30 cm short but it will have to do for now and cannot be a pair because they only had one.