The Story of A Room – Interior Design at El Fenn
In many other hotels, this room might have been split into two but we decided to make it one huge, extravagant, suite. We added this suite after buying a neighbouring house a couple of years after we opened and back then it was a series of much smaller rooms. But once we knocked down the walls, walked into the space and looked out the windows to the view of trees on either side, we felt as if we were floating in mid air.
It’s really unusual to have a double aspect room in a riad because most only have windows on one side looking out onto the central courtyard. But this suite straddles two of the houses that make up El Fenn so it has windows on either side and we wanted to make the most of that feeling. The room gets a lot of light so we decided to do dramatic black tadelakt walls to make the view of the green trees beyond the windows pop out even more.
The centrepiece of the room is of course the bed. It looks like a four poster but it’s a bit of an optical illusion because the ‘posts’ are actually material that drapes down from the canopy above the bed. Other details include the bed ‘headboard’ made of gold that was leafed onto the walls and brass and chrome discs embedded into the floor.
The bathroom too is enormous. It’s clad in turquoise tadelakt and as well as a huge tadelakt bath, there’s also a walk-in shower with a domed roof. Our signature use of stained glass can be found in this room too.
Like so much of our design process, we didn’t pin it all down into mood boards before we started. We experimented with our ideas and felt really free to try out some new ones. The aim was to create a feeling of lavish opulence.
The room has been restyled over the years but key pieces in there at the moment include a huge mid-century desk, Maison Jansen pineapple lamp and of course some art. A small fantasy watercolour of a clown by Paloma Varga Weisz hangs in the entrance and a multiple image calligraphical work by the Saudi artist Nasser Al Salem in the main room.
To have a walk around this suite take a look at this video.
Room 21 is an extra large bedroom, you can see others in this category here.