Stone House in Morocco

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When a French businessman decided to build a house in the mountains near Marrakech for himself and her son, he turned to the architect Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty from Studio KO. They fulfilled all his principal wishes: the customer wanted the house to blend in with the surrounding landscape and that there necessarily was a pool.

Stone House in Morocco by Studio KO

Stone house in the mountains near Marrakech built by Studio KO

Fournier and Marty, are good and long familiar with Moroccan culture and inspired by the local flavor. They came up with the idea to build a house in modern casbah style – fortification, where kings and other dignitaries lived in the old times; thanks to the high thick walls it was possible to escape from the attacks of enemies.

Two years after the construction began, everything was ready: 2-storey casbah of clay, red stone (the color of the local ground), and with stone floors. The house has a front hallway, four bedrooms (master’s bedroom with a balcony overlooking the Mount Toubkal, the highest ridge of the Atlas Mountains), a living room with a huge full-wall window and a fireplace, kitchen and several premises. And, of course, the architects have not forgotten about a long outdoor pool.

Marty and Fournier tried to attract maximum local craftsmen to work over the house, as hardly anyone, except the Moroccans can know all the secrets of proper construction of such traditional structures for North Africa.

As for the interior, the architects with the customer here decided not to clutter the space with excessive decoration. The basic idea was to use the landscape outside the window as the main decoration of the interior – instead of pictures.

Modern furniture was diluted with a little medieval objects, in order to give a veil of antiquity. They created a laconic and even austere interior, in which all drawn to nature.

The customer has chosen the perfect location for the home: you can escape from the sweltering African heat high in the mountains,. And on the shaded terrace where the owners love to receive guests and venturing dining, it is good to lie down on a sunbed under the tent and read “The Thousand and One Nights.”