Maison Brummell Majorelle

Christian Schallert, an Austrian hotelier, spent three years having this house built from scratch to host his friends and family, and travellers besides, and it has kept a house's scale: eight rooms, sixteen guests at most. To the street it shows a wall of pink plaster, fluted end to end, with an arch cut through to a gold door at the top of the steps. Inside, his architects, Bergendy Cooke and Amine Abouraoui, put tadelakt on the walls and terrazzo underfoot, and fitted Gio Ponti's Lama door handles, which is a good deal of pedigree to put a hand on. Ask for a Garden Deluxe: 30 square metres on the ground floor, with a private garden lined with cacti and a bath out in it, the cacti the only ones watching. Below ground, the marble hammam has a steam bath, a massage room and a small heated pool with massage jets, which is where the second of the two pools went.

Recommended for couples, in a house for adults only, and for a Marrakech that starts in a garden: after homemade Moroccan bread, baghrir and harcha with orange zest at breakfast, the Majorelle Garden and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum are across the street. Jemaa el-Fna and the souks are ten minutes by taxi, near enough to go and far enough to leave, and the hotel arranges camel rides in the Agafay desert and days in the Atlas Mountains. The pool sits in a courtyard ringed with cacti and bignonia, red sling chairs along a pink wall, and the honesty bar never closes. Dinner is the house cook's, arranged in advance - kefta, lemon chicken tajine, couscous or harira - and for guests only, so the dining room never holds more than the sixteen people the house sleeps.