Opening Shot is a column that peeks inside new hotels, restaurants, bars, and shops with dreamy interiors.
LA MAMOUNIA
Location: Marrakech
Designer: Jouin Manku
On Offer: La Mamounia is celebrating its centenary with complete restorations and refreshments of nine of the iconic Marrakech destination’s most beloved areas, each conceived by Jouin Manku. Following its 2020 work on the Churchill Bar and new Pierre Hermé tearoom, the studio has brightened up the main entrance and improved connections with the famed 37-acre garden. A central seating now anchors the wicked-walled Salon d’Honneur, while low banquettes kept intimate by glass screens and backlit moucharabieh ceiling panels now define the Alcôves lounge. Deeper in, the hotel’s beloved bars now reference those gardens and the local legacies of Moroccan crafts more vividly, while staying true to the original Art Deco spirit.
Standout Features: The circulation path from the lobby to the garden voyages through several salons and bars; fittingly, Jouin Manku brought a touch of outdoor greenery into them. Ceiling frescos inform motifs in the Allée Majorelle display cases, which beckon with colored petals. The Salon Majorelle’s former colored-glass windows are now transparent, all the better to view nature’s own palette—and the 100-year-old carob tree planted for this anniversary—from the new leaf-shaped high-back seating, while the bar is a sparkling mass of faceted glass ingots. But the shining achievement of the new spaces is surely the Centenary Chandelier, which seems to drape two “necklaces” across the pyramidal Grand Hall. Made in collaboration with the Czech lighting manufacturer Lasvit, the chandelier comprises an inner necklace of red rope strung with some 500 silver and nickel pendants, intertwined with other strands of ribbed, sandblasted, and twisted glass.
