The gloomy combination of long dark days, totting up Christmas overspending and returning to work means holidays to far-flung destinations are a distant dream for many at this time of year.
31.12.2024 - 11:07 / cntraveler.com
A winding stone path leads down to a long, shady iron pergola draped in wisteria and twisting jasmine, where Prince Fabrizio Ruspoli di Poggio Suasa, the creative force behind all this romance, is sipping a pink martini. Elegant and dashingly handsome, Ruspoli casts an eye over Olinto Atlas Mountain Retreat, his eight-acre (and expanding) garden estate. Shimmering olive trees underplanted with fragrant floriferous white Atlas rose bushes encircle an expansive pool. A walkway below us cuts through swaying, luminous Pennisetum grasses punctuated by sculptural giant agaves and supersize succulents. As we begin to wander, drinks in hand, Ruspoli points out a building in the process of being repainted; the celadon green he'd originally chosen turned out not to be precisely the shade he had envisioned. It's this sort of attention to detail, along with flawless taste, that has turned his dream into a living and growing idyll.
A rose grown at Olinto Atlas Mountain Retreat
Owner and designer Fabrizio Ruspoli
I've come to this High Atlas retreat in Marigha, an hour south of Marrakech, after a tip from Polly Nicholson, an author and specialist in historic tulips. A month earlier she had messaged me excitedly during her stay to tell me that interesting horticultural goings-on were afoot here. But just three years ago, this landscape, set against the snowcapped peaks of Toubkal National Park, was nothing more than a dusty olive tree farm.
Ruspoli, born into a noble Roman family, part of which later decamped to Paris, tells me that Olinto was a reaction to the controlled formality and grandeur of the Italian and French gardens he'd grown up with. It was inspired more by the great English gardens, like Sissinghurst Castle, which were designed as a series of intimate, exuberantly planted garden rooms. “The eye should always have something to discover,” he says.
Olinto’s architecture incorporates traditional kasbah features, like corner towers.
The on-site gardens provide ingredients for many of the restaurant’s dishes.
Olinto makes only subtle nods to traditional Islamic gardens, with its quatrefoil pools dotted with water lilies and surrounded by banks of fragrant rosemary and neatly clipped evergreens. And yet Ruspoli always knew his garden had to be in Morocco. As a child he frequently visited his grandmother at her home in Tangier. Entranced by the culture and craft of Morocco, he opened Marrakech's first riad hotel, La Maison Arabe, in 1998. A former antiques dealer, he hadn't intended to be a hotelier, but over the course of two decades, his trailblazing property slowly expanded to include 32 rooms and suites, two restaurants, a spa, a pool, a cooking school, and a country club. Ruspoli, gradually wearying of
The gloomy combination of long dark days, totting up Christmas overspending and returning to work means holidays to far-flung destinations are a distant dream for many at this time of year.
Jan 9, 2025 • 16 min read
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