Highlights
- Four bedrooms, each with its own bathroom
- Courtyard roughly nine by seven metres
- Pool about twelve by four metres
- Hand-cut zellige, used sparingly
- Roof terrace, half pergola half open
The plan
Rooms run along two sides of a courtyard, with the salon and kitchen on the third and a blank wall on the fourth. Everything looks inward. Two bedrooms sit at ground level and open onto the tiled walk; two are upstairs, the larger taking the corner and a small terrace of its own. All four have their own bathrooms. The courtyard measures roughly nine metres by seven, planted with citrus and one old olive, and it holds shade for most of the day because the building shades it in turn.
Materials and water
The zellige is used sparingly — around the fountain, again in the ground-floor bathrooms — with plain lime plaster in a warm off-white everywhere else. The pool sits beyond the courtyard in a walled garden, about twelve metres by four, so swimming and sitting stay separate rather than crowding one terrace. Staffing for a house of this kind is usually a cook and a housekeeper, in early and gone by evening unless dinner is being served.
The roof
The roof terrace runs above the bedrooms, a pergola over half of it and nothing over the rest. It tends to get used at either end of the day — early, before the courtyard warms, and again after dinner.
Amenities
- Private pool in a walled garden
- Air conditioning, normally in every bedroom
- Roof terrace with shaded seating
- Kitchen sized for a cook working for eight
- Wi-Fi throughout the house
- Parking behind the gate
Ideal for
Available on request
- Cook for breakfast and dinner
- Airport transfers
- Hammam and treatments, where the house has its own
- Guided walks in the medina
- Cot and high chair
Charged separately from the stay and confirmed case by case.
Gallery
The area
Targa is west of the centre and mostly residential: walled villas, wide quiet streets, a few good bakeries and a supermarket rather than a tourist strip. People live here all year, so it stays calm in high season. Gueliz is ten to fifteen minutes by car, the medina a little further. It suits anyone who would rather come back to quiet than to a crowd.
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 far is the medina from Targa?
Around twenty minutes by car in ordinary traffic, longer in the late afternoon. Most people staying in Targa go into the medina once or twice rather than daily, and a driver or taxi back is straightforward to arrange from the house.
Is the pool heated?
Pools in this part of Marrakech are usually heatable between November and March, though it is not something every house has. It is worth raising heating when the stay is being put together rather than on the day, since the water takes time to come up.
Can eight people eat together comfortably?
Usually. A house on this plan tends to have a long table in the courtyard and a second one indoors for cooler evenings, so a group of eight is not split across two rooms. The kitchen is usually sized for a cook catering for eight rather than for a couple.
Does a courtyard house work with small children?
Mostly. The courtyard is enclosed and two of the four bedrooms are at ground level, which helps. The stair to the first floor is open on one side and pools here are rarely fenced as standard, so a gate or pool netting is worth requesting before arrival.
Request this stay
Tell us your dates and how many of you there are. A person reads it and answers.