A lime-washed riad in the Marrakech medina that doesn’t flinch at a toddler

We arrived at the riad through a door so unremarkable that the taxi driver drove past it twice. This is the first kind thing the building does for you. The medina makes a lot of noise on the other side of a wall like that — scooters, the call to prayer at four in the afternoon, a man selling something hot in a copper pot — and then the door closes behind you and the noise simply stops.

Our youngest, who is two, fell asleep on the threshold. We carried her across the courtyard without removing her shoes, and no one minded. This is the second kind thing.

The brief

We had been told about the place by a Belgian photographer who travels alone and almost certainly does not understand what it is to arrive somewhere with four children and seven bags and an opinion about the lobby. But she had said: it is beautiful, and the people are quiet, and they will leave you alone until you don’t want them to. This turned out to be exactly the right description.

We had told them in an email, two weeks before, that there would be a baby and a four-year-old and twins on the older edge of seven. They had written back in a single line: noted, thank you. We took this to mean it had been registered somewhere. We did not understand that it had been internalized.

The cot was already in the room. No one had to ask. Someone had also folded down the bed, drawn the curtains halfway, and left a small ceramic dish of dates by the lamp.

The architecture

The walls are tadelakt — the lime-and-soap plaster that the medina has been using for a thousand years and that interior magazines have been pretending to discover for the last fifteen. Here it is the right gesture: cool in the late afternoon, warm by the doorways, the colour of a terracotta pot left in the sun for a week. It is also, it turns out, almost impossible to damage with a wet hand, a felt-tip pen, or a small foot in a wet shoe. We tested all three within the first thirty-six hours.

The courtyard is the shape of a long rectangle, with an orange tree at one end and a pool the depth of an adult ankle at the other. The pool is not for swimming. It is for the sound it makes, and for the way the water draws a long blue line across the tile at four in the afternoon. Our children walked through it forty times in five days. No one stopped them.

The food

Breakfast is served on the roof until ten, and then quietly cleared. There is a bowl of olives that arrives with everything, including, on one occasion, a request for a glass of milk for the baby. The bread is from a bakery two streets away, and the man who runs it has been baking it for the riad for eleven years. We were told this without being asked. This is the kind of place that thinks the provenance of a piece of bread is worth mentioning, and is right about it.