Worksite de Luxe

There’s nothing like a quick trip out to a 4-hectacre worksite in the Palmerie to put things in perspective. Our architect friend Nathalie is managing the construction of a hotel/villa project that locals refer to as the mini-Taj Mahal. Let me tell you, there’s nothing mini about this place, from the workforce of 400 who have been laboring there each day for months to the gold-encrusted dome of Le Grand Palais. And yes, there’s a Petit Palais, bien sur.

Rooms will start at 4000 dirhams a night and an entire villa can be had for the tidy sum of 30,000 dirhams per night. For that price, what luxuries can one expect? Well, lots of water, for one, which is in scant supply in the Palmerie. Walking through the worksite, our sneakers quickly become covered by a fine red dust the texture of ground cinnamon, and driving in, we passed though a desiccated forest of palm and olive trees. This is terrain that doesn’t get a lot of rain. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the water features that hydrate this plan. To begin with, there’s a central basin that cuts the property in two and runs for hundreds of meters and is lined with a 20-foot-high colonnade. A central walkway raised above the basin will allow guests to saunter down its length and observe carp swimming on either side. Here, even the pools have pools. That’s right, each swimming pool is enclosed within its own large water basin. The aquatic motif carries out as one crosses from the Grand to the Petit Palais, stepping along a Japanese-inspired path of square stones “floating” in yet another pool of water. The project isn’t scheduled to open until March – though no one will be surprised if it isn’t finished until much later – so the property’s lake, which occupies center stage in this extravagant folly and winds around clumps of ubiquitous palms, has not yet been filled with water. Or perhaps, with the rate of evaporation in these 105-degree days, it’s already steamed itself out.

Midway though our tour, as we’re ascending the immense marble stairway in the Grand Palais, we get an agitated call from Hamoud. Our air-conditioners have arrived, but the fellow who’s there to install them is demanding that we pay an additional sum even though the installation was included in the purchase price. It turns out everyone’s got air-conditioning woes today; plans for the Grand Palais, it turns out, never included a spot for an air-conditioning unit, or the 40 we imagine it would take to cool this colossal space. As she’s weighing ideas like false ceilings and the like, I’m trying, in what we’ve come to call our telephone French (i.e., we can’t understand a thing that’s being said to us, nor do our responses make any sense to the listener), to figure out why a guy wants 1000 dirhams to put a 4-inch hole in our ceiling. Isn’t that what an installation always entails?

Sitting down with Nathalie and the general contractor over a glass of orange juice outside one of the villas, we hear about the inevitable faire-refaire, or “build, tear down, rebuild” conundrum that characterizes Moroccan worksites. He tells us how just last week, the owner had decided he wanted a pool at one end of the giant basin. This entailed a week’s worth of work, cutting through 30 centimeters of concrete lining the basin’s bottom, digging out a full pool, pouring a fresh 30 centimeters of concrete and then lining it with tiles. No sooner had umpteen gallons of water filled the pool then the owner changed his mind and decided he liked the basin better without a pool at its mouth. And so it goes. The pool example is one of design capriciousness; the number of times an element, be it a floor, the electricity for a villa, or a skylight, is redone because someone read a plan wrong or because the work is shoddy, would make your head spin.

In some way, seeing and hearing about the problems that plague even the grandest, most finely tuned worksites is a comfort. To build a house is to succumb to inevitable frustration. How many marriages are ruined over such a project? Would life in a tent or a tricked out Airstream really be that bad? On another level, though, it was fun to hear Nathalie speak with pride and genuine pleasure about some of the small, carefully considered design details that give a home (or a palace!) real character: the shape of a door opening; the placement of a window to catch the light just so; a fireplace that floats in the middle of a room. Visitors to Dar Noury, we hope, will marvel at the artful way the electric lines and plumbing tubes of our air-conditioners are buried in the walls. Form and function, baby, form and function!