Boutique Museum Residence · Essaouira
A work of art you can live in.
au delà du confort .... l'émotion
Some houses are built to be lived in. Others are composed the way a work of art is.
villa museum mogador belongs to the second kind.
Conceived by Rachid Haloui — architect, teacher, photographer and collector — it brings architecture, memory, art and hospitality together within a single house.
Nothing here is merely decorative. Every volume, every material, every object and every image plays its part in the narrative.
A museum from the threshold
The exhibition begins before anyone notices that it has begun.
An object in a passage. A photograph at the turn of a staircase. An old door. A fragment of carved wood. A piece of ceramic. An image of Essaouira.
At villa museum mogador there is no real dividing line between the rooms that exhibit and the rooms that are lived in.
The house is the museum.
And, for the length of a stay, the visitor becomes its inhabitant.
Four apartments, four narratives
The four apartments of villa museum mogador were not conceived as four variations on a single design.
Each holds a memory of its own.
Essaouira. Fès. Maroc Ancien. Autrefois.
Four names, four atmospheres, four ways of recounting a place and its history through the works, the materials, the furniture and the objects Rachid Haloui has chosen.
You are not simply choosing an apartment. You are choosing the narrative you wish to inhabit.
He photographed the city before building in it
Long before it became the address of villa museum mogador, Essaouira had already been one of Rachid Haloui's subjects for many years.
The harbour. The ramparts. The medina. The façades. The ocean. The wind. The light.
He watched them and photographed them over the years.
The Villa now carries that attention further: no longer photographing Essaouira alone, but building a place from which to go on looking at it.
