Musée de Marrakech

The Musée de Marrakech occupies Dar Mnebhi, built in 1898 for Mehdi Mnebhi, who would serve Sultan Abdelaziz as minister of war. It belongs to a small group of houses raised in the same handful of years by men of the same court: the Bahia Palace went up for the grand vizier Si Musa and his son Ba Ahmed, Dar Si Said for Ba Ahmed's brother, this one for the war minister. The building announces itself at once. The patio runs to 709 square metres on a plot of 2,108, and an enormous spherical chandelier of hammered metal hangs above the central basin from the carved cedar ceiling. The courtyard doubles as an exhibition space for temporary shows. The permanent collection occupies the rooms and galleries around it: coins from different dynasties, ceramics from Fez and Safi, embroidered textiles, Amazigh jewellery and carpets, calligraphy and works on paper. The presentation varies from room to room, some galleries close to the careful contextualization of an international institution, others arranged more simply. The palace hammam is kept as an exhibit, tiled basins, cedar-screened dressing rooms and the progression from cool to hot, which shows plainly how water was built into a Moroccan house. The museum is private. After Mnebhi's death the palace became a girls' school after independence, then stood empty for years, until the collector and patron Omar Benjelloun restored it and opened it in March 1997; his foundation runs it still. What it offers, beyond the collection, is one of the finest palace interiors in the Medina, open to anyone who walks in.