'Serai' - a place of rest for weary travelers

A Place to Grow and to Exchange Ideas

“This is a place without any pretension, where form follows function. First and foremost a family home, it’s a wonderfully personal place in which to be a guest.”

A Place to Feel at Home

“There is a joy in every detail here. I’ve been coming for years; I even built some bits of it myself. I can’t keep away, it inspires me so much.”

Event Spaces

The original vision behind the Serai was “an inspiring and visually compelling space for teachers of art, well-being and sustainable living to bring their students to”. We’ve gone completely out of our way to create an unrivalled choice of beautiful and original spaces for workshops, discussions, lectures, dance, etc.. It is ideal for intimate groups of up to 15 people.

The ‘Temple’

The ‘Temple’ is a beautiful space of 6m x 11m with a wooden floor of recycled beech wood. Light and views flood in through large, shaded windows to the East and West. Curtains ensure privacy if required, while the vaulted and muralled ceiling offers extraordinary acoustics.

The House & Around

The Serai was designed for groups, having indoor and outdoor stages, the vaulted saloon, an enormous flat roof, the sunset deck and front terraces. There can also be prepared spaces in the garden and previous groups have made much use of the beach, which at low tide is huge.

Bedrooms

Celebrating natural lime plasters and time-worn, recycled wood, bedrooms are unpretentious and uncluttered. Large glass doors and cleverly angled windows fill every corner with light and reward every glance with a view. Hammam style bathrooms of exposed, handmade brick and rich tadelakt plasters lend a deep warmth to the space.

The North Wing

The north wing houses the principal bedroom (8x4m, sleeps 3). With large French windows opening onto a small courtyard and the western terrace, plus more windows to the north, this room is large and filled with light. The en-suite bathroom is of exposed brick and rich tadelakt and there is a divan that converts to a single bed if needed.

The Mezzanine Room

Accessed via the central courtyard, this room features a king-size double, or twin beds, and makes use of a higher ceiling to offer a mezzanine space for 2-3 children (or 1-2 adults), accessed by a spiral staircase. There’s an en-suite bathroom, and French window opening onto a south-facing patio.

Double / Twin Rooms

The Tower Library

This small reading room and library has the best views of any in the house and converts between a single, double or twin bedroom. There’s no en-suite bathroom but a compost toilet is there if needed and there are bathroom facilities downstairs. You can lie in bed and watch the setting moon paint a silvery street across the ocean, or on darker nights see the myriad lights of the Essaouira sardine boats twinkling like a line of stars on the horizon.

En-suite double / twin rooms

These 3 rooms are similar in size (26sqm)and layout, each offering a king-size double (or twin beds), en-suite turret bathroom, and a French window opening onto a south-facing patio. The SouthWest bedroom, however, also features a huge, west-facing French window opening onto another patio with outstanding views down the coast and over the ocean.

Relaxing Spaces

The Serai has attracted much architectural interest for its “simultaneous expression of scale and intimacy”. Non-architects just say it has a ‘magical atmosphere’. That ‘magic’ is something to do with light and space and texture; the way they intereact as the sun moves from one window to the next and the way you are ‘bathed’ in it all wherever you happen to be sitting.

Indoors

The kitchen, dining room, hall, and saloon with its stage and tremendous vaulted ceiling, are all open plan but can be separated as required with sliding doors and curtains.

Outdoors

The courtyard is the beating heart of the Serai. Arranged on three levels beneath a natural roof of vines and honeysuckle, it features a natural plunge pool cleaned by a border of wetland plants. At the western end there’s a bar area and steps up to a roof terrace with more shaded and comfortable seating and breathtaking views.

Catering

Self cater in our fully-equipped kitchen or let our own wonderful and highly experienced cook, Amin, take the strain.

Also possible is a specialised chef from the local area.

See here for further information.

Breakfast on the kitchen patio, lunch beneath the dappled shade of the courtyard, dinner around the enormous banqueting table…; a choice of lovely spaces and views to compliment the delicious intimacy of eating together.

Sustainability?

We’re still working on this, and probably always will be. It’s not enough to donate 10% of revenue to the local community, or to have used as much as possible natural and recycled building materials in the build, or that we turn our waste and grey water into compost for soil regeneration, or even that the house is designed around rainwater catchment and storage; there will always be new ways to reduce our ecological footprint and to pro-actively benefit the local environment and community.

Water, water, water

This part of Morocco is semi arid, bordering on arid. Average annual rainfall is a bare 15cms and Azrou Issa does not enjoy easy-to-reach groundwater. We do have a well but it produces very little each day, so the building is designed to harvest and store every possible liter of rainwater and then recycle as much of that as possible. We could buy in water, but that’s not a sustainable solution to the problem, so instead we use our reserves very carefully indeed, especially through the long summer drought. We ask that guests respect and remember this whenever they go to turn on a tap or take a shower. And whilst there are flush loos in all the bathrooms we also ask guests to consider using instead our beautiful vermi-compost toilets. To live sustainably in an environment such as this it is vital to ‘close the loop’ and feed back into the soil as much as we can.

The Serai, Morocco