Highlights
- Seven bedrooms, each with a bathroom
- Colonnade on all four sides
- Three salons at ground level
- Cold marble basin in the courtyard
- Roof terrace under a reed pergola
The courtyard and the salons
The courtyard is the whole point of a house like this, and this one is wide enough that the galleries running above it never feel like corridors. A colonnade goes round all four sides — plastered columns at ground level, carved cedar above — and the orange trees in the middle throw real shade by late morning. Three salons open off the ground floor. That matters more than it sounds: with fourteen people in the house, one group can read, another can play cards and a third can sleep off lunch without anybody having to go out.
Cool, dim, and slow to warm
Riads were built to lose heat rather than gather light, and this one behaves accordingly. By August the ground floor is noticeably cooler than the street. The basin in the courtyard, about three metres of marble-lined water, is for standing in; unheated and open to the sky, it stays cold well into spring. Bedrooms are dark by design: one or two rooms off the gallery normally hold afternoon light, and the rest stay dim all day.
The roof terrace
Breakfast usually happens up on the roof, under a reed pergola, before the sun climbs high enough to drive everyone back down. On clear winter mornings the Atlas shows over the rooftops to the south.
Amenities
- Colonnaded courtyard with marble basin
- Three salons at ground level
- Roof terrace with reed pergola
- Housekeeping, normally part of a house like this
- Breakfast usually prepared in the house
- Wi-Fi
Ideal for
Available on request
- Cook for dinner
- Airport transfers
- Hammam and massage
- Guided medina walks
- Additional staff
Charged separately from the stay and confirmed case by case.
Gallery
The area
Dar el Bacha sits at the northern edge of the medina, where the lanes widen out and a car can usually get within a short walk of the door. The main street carries traffic, cafés and shops, so the quarter stays busy well into the evening rather than shutting down with the souks. Walls here are thick and doors are heavy, and most of that noise stops at the threshold.
What the photos won't tell you
Every listing in the world photographs the pool from its best corner, and no photograph answers the questions that decide a stay. So before you commit, we put the following in writing for your dates:
- How far the car gets, and how many metres and steps remain with the luggage.
- Who the neighbours are, and what you will hear at five in the morning.
- Whether the pool is heated, and in which months that decides whether you swim.
- What “staffed” covers — who is there, at what hours, and who cooks.
- Where the wifi actually reaches, not just where the router is.
- Which of the property’s own photographs were taken with a wide-angle lens, and what a room looks like from the doorway.
Common questions
How does the house divide up for fourteen guests?
Seven bedrooms, each with a bathroom, on two levels around the courtyard, plus three separate salons downstairs. The rooms are not all the same size or the same distance from the courtyard, so it helps to say how the group splits before anyone allocates them.
Can a car get to the door?
In this part of the medina, usually within a minute or two of it. Dar el Bacha has wider lanes than the souks, so a transfer normally stops close by rather than at a distant gate, and luggage goes the last stretch by cart or by hand.
Is the courtyard basin somewhere you can swim?
No. It is roughly three metres of marble-lined water, open to the sky and unheated, so it works as a place to stand and cool down in high summer and is genuinely cold in March. Groups who want to swim properly are better off outside the walls.
What are these houses like in winter?
Thick walls hold cold as efficiently as they keep heat out in August, and an open courtyard means the ground floor never fully warms. Salons in a house of this kind are normally heated and bedrooms usually have heating of some sort; it is worth checking room by room for a December stay.
Request this stay
Tell us your dates and how many of you there are. A person reads it and answers.