Design Drool: Arabian Delights

Filed under: Color, House Tours, Architecture

Maryam Montague, her husband and their two kids left home looking for an adventure. What they found was a far-flung place to call their own.

Maryam Montague was working for a consulting firm in Washington, DC when she realized she was ready for a change. She didn't want a new job; she loved her work. She wanted to live somewhere else. She could move anywhere -- her husband, an architect, was ready to head to a new locale, her two kids, Tristan, 9, and Skylar, 11, adapted easily to new places, and her boss told her she could work from anywhere. The couple was living in Africa at the time, and they considered going back to the U.S. or making a home in some of the other places Maryam has lived, such as Senegal and France.

They settled on Marrakesh, Morocco.

"Once upon a time...," she writes on her blog My Marrakesh, "in a kingdom far, far away (not kidding about the kingdom part) an American couple with two children decided to eschew any plans that they might have had for house with a white picket fence (do people still have those?) and move to a city that was not their own. This blog is their tale to make that city their home, to make it their Marrakesh."


Maryam, who has lived and worked in Senegal, Nepal, Pakistan, Namibia and Bangladesh, says she was drawn to Marrakesh for the "delicious food, hospitable people, the fantastic weather and the amazing architecture and design," she says. "It was just the right combination of new world conveniences and old world exotica."

Most of all, it seemed like the perfect place to raise her family. Living a nomadic and international jet-setting lifestyle as a humanitarian worker, while exciting and adventurous, can also make one feel like no place is truly home.

But home is what they now have at Peacock Pavilions, an 8-acre estate that she and her husband built from the ground up. Surrounded by olive trees, Peacock Pavilions is both Maryam and her family's home as well as a boutique hotel. Two of the three pavilions are guest houses (Atlas and Medina Pavilions); the getaway sleeps ten people (double occupancy) in five bedrooms with access to the estate's five acres of olive groves and an 800-square-foot pool and pool pavilion. Maryam's part of the estate is about 4,500 square feet with four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a den, great room, kitchen, library, dining room and two offices in an attached tower.

While Chris did most of the designing and overseeing of the build, Maryam did all of the decorating for both her home and the guesthouses. She channeled her parents in the decoration, filling the home with curiosities from every country that she visits. When Maryam was younger, her father, also a humanitarian often on the road, would bring back souvenirs from his travels. "Depending on where he was going, he might bring back silk rugs from India, tribal masks from Swaziland or inlaid furniture from Syria. My home looked like a gallery of strange and curious things," Maryam recalls.

Living in Morocco has had a profound effect on the way she's decorated the home's interiors -- she has embraced lots of color and pattern, and mixed in different styles for an eclectic look. When it comes to pattern and color, Maryam says that there's "never enough!" The home has modern conveniences, like clean, modern lines and open concept living, yet the design is distinctly Moroccan through the addition of fountains, arches and a dome.

Maryam still works for her Washington, DC employer, but she's taken on a few different roles since moving to Morocco. She runs a side business selling Moroccan carpets and textiles, which can be seen covering most of the surfaces of her home. She also designed Moroccan lanterns that she hung throughout the house. "I'm stimulated by a mixture of pieces both old and new and both Moroccan and global," she explains. "It's a crazy jumble that I find interesting and amusing. I am a strong believer in surprising interiors."

And surprising they are. Traditional and modern Moroccan and worldly goods live in harmony at Peacock Pavilions, where you might find vintage Spanish billboards alongside a table made from old Moroccan street signs. Or perhaps a Moroccan tent covered in painted embroidery designs and filled with plastic furniture from the 1960s.

Although Peacock Pavilions officially opened its doors this fall, Maryam says she'll never be done renovating and decorating. "I find my style is constantly evolving, and I like to experiment with my interiors. I recently lugged back from Cairo seven hand blown glass lanterns that I am concocting into the Arabian chandelier of my fantasies," she says. I suppose that's what happens when you're always traveling to inspiring places -- the imagination runs wild.

Since the weather there is often comfortable in the 60s and 70s (with the exception of the scorching summers), Maryam and her family spend a lot of time outdoors and even enjoy an outdoor cinema. Living as expats has afforded them the luxury of having some domestic help; the family has a cook, housekeeper and gardener to assist with the household chores. Apparently, the dollar goes quite far in Morocco!

Besides chronicling her adventures and family life on her blog, Maryam is working on a coffee table book that is part memoir, part Moroccan design treatise (to be published by Artisan Books in the US in 2011). She offers her eye as a designer alongside her husband, and she's hoping to launch an eclectic homewares line inspired by all of her travels: lanterns, poufs, slippers, hooks and curiosities. She calls it "ethnic glamour."

Although she's found a place to call home, Maryam isn't ready to stop traveling. Says Maryam: "So far I have traveled to 72 countries. And if I haven't been somewhere, it's on my list!"


Take a few more house tours:
-A Show House Made for the Movies
-San Francisco Home Has Walls that Wow

If Maryam's tale has put you in the mood for Moroccan food, you'll love these recipes from KitchenDaily.

 

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