What the staff tell you about a villa.

A villa is the people who keep it. This is the line we use, internally, when we visit one for the first time.

The first ten minutes are nearly always misleading — too much polishing, too much ceremony, too many flowers. What we look for instead are the corners. Are the staff easy with each other? Do they speak before being spoken to? Is the cook the most senior person in the room when food arrives?

The properties we keep in the house are the ones where the answer is yes. They are also, almost without exception, the properties whose owners we have known the longest. Marrakech is a small city; the families who built the riads we use have been doing so for two and three generations. The continuity matters.

When we send a client to one of our eighty-five villas, we are sending them, first, to a household. The architecture is the second thing.

A list of properties we are taking enquiries for this season is available on request — cs@fabriqe.com.