Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1507768
P H OTO S BY A N D R E W M O N TG O M E RY ( V I L L A M A B R O U K A ); E B O N Y S I OV H A N (O L I N TO) next door, a farm-to-table restaurant, where she will curate the wine list and cocktails; there are impressive vineyards in and around Meknès in the northern reaches of the country, and Mérette-Jara hopes to tout the virtues of the previously overlooked grapes here. The allure of Morocco today, she emphasizes, is how it artfully straddles modern life and tra- dition. "Things are booming, but there's a great reminder here that you can't go faster than what life has put in front of you." Hadia Temli a g rees. The Tang ier-raised ga llerist is one of the cutting-edge talents in Morocco; the daughter of an expat Italian and one of the countr y's foremost antiques dealers, Temli was schooled around the world. Still, she relishes the distinctive culture of Morocco: "It's a beautiful, colorful, timeless mess. One minute I'm driving my kids to school in a 4x4, and the next, someone with a donkey carriage has to cross the street and will wave contentedly, with a big smile," she says. Growing up, Temli was connected to the country's fashionista-driven heyday— Saint Laurent designed some of the costumes for her school plays—but she relishes today's sense of newfound vibrancy. She opened her project space, Siniya28, in 2017, and has earned international acco- lades for her gallery's programming, heavy on female artists from the Arab world. A forthcoming installation, starting in December, will give the entire space over to Yemeni-Bosnian creative Alia Ali, who will create site-specific work there via a year-long residency. Jasper Conran will likely still be in Morocco in December to see Ali's work. "It's taken over my life, like giving birth to a baby," he laughs, of the Villa Mabrouka project. "This is about the thoughts of a lifetime, ever y thing being done in a considered, beautiful way that 's also so relaxed," he adds, talking as much of Morocco itself as his own hotel. "There's a blossoming here, and I don't want to think about any thing else at the moment." "TA NGIER IS A PLACE TH AT H AS A FOOT IN BOTH EU ROPE A N D THE A RA B WORLD. IT'S A HEA DY MIX, A N D A GREAT COMBINATION." —JASPER CONR AN FROM TOP A small pool at Jasper Conran's Villa Mabrouka, which opened earlier this year in Tangier; the nine-room Olinto; the Marrakech Suite at Villa Mabrouka. 216 BAL HARBOUR