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"View Slideshow\n\nBeautiful Marrakech is the accessible side of the exotic\u2014the romance and jostle of the faraway made familiar by legacies from the West. The geography is Africa, while the history and political inclinations owe much to Europe. There is the traditional rammed-earth construction of North Africa. There are palaces with the ornament brought by invaders from Andalusia and villas with the Art D\u00E9co style brought by administrators of the 20th-century French Protectorate. Marrakech is booming.\n\nWhich is good, if challenging, news for hotels. Guests are likely to be young, stressed, short of time and accustomed to luxury. The Bauchet-Bouhlal family, three generations who have owned and shaped the famous Es Saadi Gardens &amp;amp; Resort, have delivered more than luxury with the villas recently constructed on the hotel's grounds. Each of the 10 villas is a different fantasy, a little palace designed to showcase the best of the world's architecture, from India to Rome.\n\nAlthough each villa has luxurious amenities such as 24-hour butler service and its own heated pool, the real intent is to surprise, to take visitors to other worlds.\n\nBig dreams seem to run in the family. Jean Bauchet brought new life to war-weary Paris by developing the Moulin Rouge and the Casino de Paris. In the early 1950s, after dining with one of his clients, a pasha from Morocco, he followed his new friend's advice and visited Marrakech. That was all it took. He stayed, bought 20 acres of empty land just outside the gates of the walled medina and built a casino. His dancers from Paris came for the opening. Josephine Baker and Maurice Chevalier came too. Word got out: This was the place to be.\n\nPeople flew in from Paris for weekends\u2014it was all top hats, black ties and jewels. The glamorous set that went to Deauville and Evian during the summer went to Marrakech for the winter.\n\nA hotel adjacent to Bauchet's casino came next, and he asked the new king, Hassan II, to choose its name. By royal suggestion, the new hotel was called Es Saadi, meaning \"the contented one\" but also a reference to the Saadian dynasty.\n\nThat was 1966. Soon thereafter, Cecil Beaton photographed Mick Jagger beside the pool; Princess Margaret arrived, and so did Pierre Balmain. The rich and the famous followed.\n\nIn 1966 Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal joined her father at the hotel, and in 2001 her son, Jean-Alexandre, became part of the family team. They used their collective imaginations to conceive the villas, which Jean-Alexandre calls \"a bit of Oriental craziness, 10 hideaways that take a new generation of guests down a path of dreams.\"\n\nThe architect for the project was a family friend, Aziz Lamghari, a Moroccan well known for palaces around the world. The instructions they gave him? \"Have fun.\"\n\nHe did. His only restrictions were that each villa must be very comfortable and no trees were to be cut down. As Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal puts it, \"We could all be foolish together. Every day someone had a new idea. We wanted too much of everything, but the architect kept the balance.\"\n\nShe designed the interiors as though they were her own home, using antiques from around the world that she and her husband had collected. \"We had a dream and didn't know what it was,\" she says, \"but when something beautiful comes along, you have to take it.\"\n\nMoroccan craftsmen are good\u2014very good\u2014and the family knew that if you live in a treasure land, you must take advantage of it. Locals wove fabrics, forged metal and embroidered linens with motifs specific to each villa.\n\nThere are indeed treasures of all kinds, but these days it is often the simple luxuries that can be the most difficult to find. Sun in winter, the music of birds, the scent of orange blossom and jasmine, the serenity of the garden after a morning lost in the souk\u2014all are here, but for many, the greatest luxury is total privacy.\n\nThe villas, along with their gardens and pools, are well hidden\u2014only an occasional dome can be seen above dense plantings and mature trees. Guests are driven directly to the door of their villa. Celebrities stay, and nobody knows they are there.\n\nThese villas are built for dreams. They are also an unspoken acknowledgment of the rich architectural heritage of Marrakech, right for the place and right for the time."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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