Bohemian Cool
A short drive north of Marrakesh’s Medina, Jnane Tamsna is the brainchild of Meryanne Loum-Martin, its surrounding garden created by her husband, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Matin.
We met with Meryanne Loum-Martin in the garden behind the hotel, and sat down with her for a conversation on hospitality, tourism in Marrakesh, and her journey from lawyer to hotelier.
How come you ended up in Marrakesh?
I’m from Paris and came to Marrakesh for the first time in 1985, scouting for land to build a family holiday house. I had a friend who had a place there, and my parents wanted a house in a place not farther than a three-hour flight from Paris. I fell in love with the place. I found a piece of land to buy, fifteen minutes from here.
At first it was going to be a holiday house for the family, but very quickly I realized that there was a huge gap between how the average tourist experienced Marrakesh and how people who knew people here would live.
The return rate of tourists at that time was peanuts, something like one percent or something. People would say that they had gone to Marrakesh and that there was nothing here to do. I had a very social life in Paris, as a lawyer, and I remember being at dinner parties and people wondered why I so often went to Marrakesh; ‘what is there to do there?!’. For three years, I would travel once a month and spend one week working on the construction site, and the other three weeks of the month I would be a lawyer in Paris, which was a very different life.
And then, while I was doing this project, I had the idea to turn it into a business. I convinced my father to buy another plot of land, next to the one we already had, and then we would build two properties, with the concept of very high-end rentals, based on the type of lifestyle offer that no one else was providing. We opened in December ’89, and it never stopped being packed, packed, packed! One property had four bedrooms and the other had six bedrooms, each had a garden and pool, tennis court for the two, and a guest cottage.
How did people first hear about you?
One of our first clients was Brad Pitt, and he told all of Hollywood, ‘Forget about everything else, this is the way to travel!’. Early on, we also had Giorgio Armani staying with us, who came several times, and the Missoni family. This was before the digital era, so people would just trust the word of other people.
When Giorgio Armani came the first time, I showed him around and I was worried because he was known to be so specific about things, but he said, ‘I wouldn’t change one thing’. He rented the whole place for him, his family and his friends, and had brought along Italian food for everyone, but he told me, ‘Next time I don’t need to bring my own food, the cuisine here is excellent’. So that’s how it started.
We very much protected the privacy of our guests. The staff had strict rules to never say who was staying at the house, before the people had left for two weeks, and I think that all the very famous people who used to come to the house enjoyed having the whole place to themselves. They also liked that the lifestyle was varied, one day lunch was had here, the next we would surprise them in another part of the garden, another day it was on the roof. You know, it was a constant thing, and the exact thing that very big hotels can’t provide.
Tell me about this area that we’re in.
In the Palmeraie, where we are now, nothing was yet built, it was a very healthy place! We had no water problems, because we didn’t have this nonsense of people planting large lawns. The staff would ask the guests, if the weather was great, if they would like to go for a picnic, and the gates would open and there would be a caravan of camels to take the guests to a picnic site. There would be a horse carriage and musicians playing along the way. We would provide real tables, silverware and china, and serve them champagne.
This was in the ‘90s, when advertising was a big thing in France. One very influential CEO of an advertising firm discovered us and began bringing his clients here. He told me, ‘The great thing about your place is that after four days there, I know I will get the contract signed!’.
It was also a time when the boutique hotel concept was starting out, and people started to realize that there were other ways to travel than being in an impersonal place with 2,000 rooms around you. The concept was that people would pay a flat rate, it was quite expensive, but after that there would never be any mention of money. Whatever they wanted, the staff would provide.