Step off Jemaa el-Fna and into the medina’s tangle of alleyways, and the city pulls its own volume down. Within a few minutes’ walk, the tourist-heavy souks give way to the quieter quarter of Kaat Benahid, where children play football in the narrow derbs and metalworkers’ hammers keep their steady rhythm. At the end of one such passage, a heavy cedar door opens onto Riad Berbère — a thirteenth-century house remodelled in the seventeenth, and today a guesthouse of just five rooms that operates less as a hotel than as an extended home.

The riad is the work of Sandrine Henry, its French interior designer and co-founder, whose deep affection for Morocco is evident in every gesture. Rather than import a polished expatriate aesthetic, Henry has chosen to foreground Berber craft — the rugs, ceramics, textiles and metalwork of the Atlas Mountains and the Ourika Valley — and to layer it with antiques gathered over a decade of travel. The effect is unforced, more home than hotel. Walls are finished in tadelakt the colour of desert dawn; floors are warm terracotta; doors are carved cedar; and alcoves cradle groupings of hammered copper pots and hand-thrown pottery.

The three suites and two double rooms are each arranged around the central patio — a sunlit courtyard planted with orange and olive trees and centred on a small plunge pool. The suites lean antique: heavy textiles in burnt orange and deep green, vintage kilims and framed hand-drawn Amazigh motifs; the double rooms feel more garden-bound, opening directly onto the patio with shutters that can be thrown back on cooler mornings. Bathrooms are finished, again, in tadelakt — silky to the touch, softening every surface with its characteristic sheen.

Meals at Riad Berbère are unshowy and domestic in scale. Breakfast is a long, slow affair of msemen, fresh figs, labneh and mint tea taken on the patio or the rooftop; dinner is served by request, a single changing Berber-inflected menu built around whatever the market has offered that morning. The rooftop terrace, lanterns hung overhead, is where guests tend to end their days, looking across the medina’s tiled roofs towards the Atlas in the distance. For those who want a hammam, one of the medina’s best sits minutes away. What Riad Berbère offers, more than anything, is the rare pleasure of being a guest rather than a customer.