Villas and riads we source.

How to choose between them

Inside the walls, or outside

This is the first decision and it settles most of the others. A riad inside the medina is a courtyard house rented whole with staff: you walk out of the door into the souks and you do not need a driver for most of what you will do. The price of that is water. A pool in a riad usually means a two-metre plunge you cool off in, not something you swim lengths in, and the last stretch to the door is on foot — some riads are two minutes from a taxi, others eight minutes through lanes you cannot wheel a suitcase down.

A villa in the Palmeraie inverts it. You get a full-size pool, a walled garden and quiet, twenty to thirty minutes from the medina — and you need transport arranged, because taxis do not reliably come out that far. Treating the driver as an optional extra is the most common error here, and sorting it late costs more than arranging it up front.

How many bedrooms, and where they sit

Bedroom count on its own is a poor way to choose. Eight bedrooms spread between a main house and a distant annexe is a very different holiday from eight around one courtyard, and at the larger sizes it is worth establishing how much of the sleeping capacity is actually in the main house before anything else. Ask too how many bedrooms are genuinely doubles rather than a sofa bed in a study.

Which part of the city, or out of it

The medina puts you inside the thing you came for. The Palmeraie, a palm grove north-east of the city, gives space and quiet at twenty to thirty minutes. Further south, along the roads towards Ourika and Amizmiz, sit newer houses built to face the High Atlas — glass and rammed earth rather than carved plaster, quieter still, and twenty-five to forty minutes out. One caution on those: the mountain view does not bring mountain temperatures. They sit on the plain and take the full summer heat with less shade than an old medina house, and forty minutes each way turns a casual dinner in Gueliz into a two-hour commitment.

The season decides more than people expect

Between October and April an unheated pool is too cold to use, so whether a pool is heated — and what switching it on costs — is the question that changes a winter booking. In a riad the equivalent question is heating: thick walls and an open courtyard are built to keep heat out, which works against you in December and January, so confirm the bedrooms have working heating rather than extra blankets.

With children

For families the priorities invert, and a family villa with garden and pool is chosen on different things: pool safety provision first — fence, net, alarm or nothing — then whether the children can sleep near you or are down a separate wing, then cots, high chairs and whether the cook will cook for children rather than only for adults. Choosing on photographs is the trap. A villa that photographs beautifully often has the pool edge flush with the terrace and the family bedrooms at opposite ends of the house, which are the two things that make a week with small children harder. Ask for a floor plan and a photograph of the pool edge.

For a group, or an event

Above sixteen people, or for a wedding, the format changes to an estate with large grounds, eight to fifteen or more bedrooms, and — the part that is not negotiable — a property that explicitly permits events. Not every large villa does, and that permission is the first thing to establish. After it come the catering model, since some estates require their own kitchen team while others let you bring a caterer, and whether there is enough covered outdoor space if the weather turns. At this size everything that matters should be in writing before payment: by the time you discover that music must stop at eleven, or that six of the beds are in a separate building, the deposit is paid.