Dar Ahlam

Thierry Teyssier, a French theatre producer, bought a crumbling kasbah in the palm grove of Skoura in the early 2000s and opened it as Dar Ahlam in 2002. The name means 'house of dreams', and the premise was theatrical from the start: no menu, no restaurant as such, and a daily programme written for each guest, with meals laid in a different corner of the gardens, the kasbah or the surrounding desert every time.

History

The kasbah is about 200 years old, built in pisé, the rammed earth of the region, by a local family in the palm grove of Skoura, east of Ouarzazate. Teyssier restored it over two years with local builders, keeping the thick walls and the tower rooms, and furnished it with Moroccan pieces rather than imports. The house joined Relais & Châteaux. Teyssier later took the same idea elsewhere, including a series of itinerant hotels that moved between countries, but Dar Ahlam stayed the base and the model.

Architecture and design

Pisé walls a metre thick keep the rooms cool in summer and warm in the desert nights. The kasbah's rooms open on to a central courtyard and up on to roof terraces that look across the palms towards the High Atlas. A walled garden surrounds the house, with palms, olives and a kitchen garden supplying the cooking, and a pool set among the trees. Several garden houses were added later in the same earth-built style, with their own terraces and pools, so that the property grew without a new building rising above the old one.

Rooms and suites

The rooms are divided between the kasbah itself and the houses in the garden. Those in the kasbah are shaped by the old building, with alcoves, fireplaces and small windows; the garden houses are larger and more private. None has a television. Numbers are small, well under 20 keys in total, which keeps the staff-to-guest ratio high and makes the daily choreography possible.

Dining

There is no dining room in the ordinary sense. The kitchen cooks Moroccan dishes with the garden's produce, and each meal is staged somewhere new: breakfast on a roof, lunch under a tent among the palms, dinner beside a fire in the dunes or in a candlelit room of the kasbah. Guests are asked about preferences on arrival and then left to be surprised. Picnics on excursions follow the same rule, with a table and chairs carried out to a riverbank or a hilltop.

Weddings and events

The house is taken as a whole by families and small wedding parties; with fewer than 20 rooms, a full buyout is the usual format for a celebration, with ceremonies held in the garden, on the roofs or at a camp in the desert set up by the hotel's own team. The house does not take conferences.

Location

Skoura is a palm grove on the road between Ouarzazate and the Dades valley, dotted with old kasbahs, of which Amridil is the best known. Ouarzazate airport is about 40 kilometres to the west, with flights from Casablanca and some European cities; the drive over the Tizi n'Tichka pass from Marrakech takes four to five hours. Day trips reach the Valley of the Roses at Kelaat M'Gouna, the Dades gorge and the ksar of Aït Benhaddou, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, as well as the film studios of Ouarzazate. The hotel also runs excursions further into the south, with nights under canvas arranged by its own staff. As a luxury hotel in Skoura, it has no peer of its rank in the palm grove.