This photograph was taken from the gates of Villa Janna (www.villajanna.com), a guest house set in agricultural land to the east of Marrakech. It is an important guest house from our perspective as our involvement in this building project was our initial reason for coming to Morocco. Villa Janna took five years to build and is one of the only hotels in Morocco built entirely from ecologically-friendly adobe mud bricks. The reason that the project took so long was that all of the building materials (ie the bricks) had to be made on site, prior to the construction. The build used over one and a half million bricks (most of which weighed 14kg and measured 40cm in length) which took over a year to make. Using two cement mixers (running eight hours per day) the raw earth excavated from the swimming pool and the foundations was miwed with water, straw and sand before being left to stand for two days. This allows the mix to firm up sufficiently to be used in the manufacture of the bricks. The bricks were then made in moulds (of six bricks at a time) by a team of thirty people and then left to dry for between four and eight days, depending on the season, before stocking them on pallets on site. The pallets, piled over a metre high with bricks, occupied more than a hectare of land before the bricks were used for the construction itself. The bricks were then laid using a mortar made of similar constituents and later rendered using a mud plaster with lime to increase the walls' waterproofing qualities. The architecture of the guest house takes its inspiration from Egypt and the work of architect Hassan Fathi; a single storey building with thick walls and domes and nubian vaults for ceilings. This type of traditional building method is ideal in a climate like Marrakech's as buildings of this nature stay cool in summer and keep their heat in winter. Although Moroccans still build using this material we encountered difficulties finding anyone who knew how to build domes and vaults from bricks. Hence we had to train bricklayers on site to make these features. The guest house is set in eight acres of land and has seventeen rooms plus 2 private villas and is one of the only first class hotels of its kind in Morocco. Around this area (although not quite so rural) there are other luxurious villas such as Jnane Tamsna, Villa des Palmiers, Dar Zemora and Dar Ayniwen making a good choice for those who favour the luxury of space, something that is virtually impossible to come by in the Marrakech medina. Please enquire for details on any of these properties.
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