A visit to Jnane Tamsna and Marrakech really changed my perspective on travel. Morocco had always been on my hit list for many, many years, but the kind of welcome I received and the perspective I gained from being at this hotel and spending time with a woman and an iconic personality like Meryanne really centred me and made me realise that there’s literally nobody like her on this planet.

She’s one of the most unique people I’ve met in my life, and I really want to keep talking about her until everybody knows about the kind of hospitality offering and oasis of calm that she has created in the Palmeraie of Marrakech.

I have fallen in love with Jnane Tamsna, and I believe you have cracked the code when it comes to ensuring that a like-minded crowd is magnetised towards the hotel and property, creating a space for connection. What do you feel is the most important ingredient when it comes to hospitality for an independent hotel, especially looking at your own success?

I think that, at one point, it became a very natural way of life and a very natural flow. You know, when a space is designed and conceived by people who actually happen to live on the site, it becomes something very different. The hotel has been designed and conceived by creative people who have their own home on the estate. In a way, the hotel lives as we like to live.

It’s connected to nature, to the gardens, and to the daily vegetable crops that are harvested before the meals. Decades ago, we fell in love with Morocco — with its history, its culture and its aesthetics. So, of course, we wanted to design our place with a Moroccan identity, mixed with our own diverse cultural heritage.

There are the archways, old doors and perspectives that bring in the Moroccan inspiration, and then there are tons of books, antiques, rugs, old family photographs and a lot of art that reflect our own personal cultural heritage.

And I think this is really what touches people, because they feel a very strong sense of place, while at the same time they can feel that it has been created by foreigners who are deeply in love with Morocco.

And, you know, talking about the way we live, we now have a beautiful baby grand piano, which has led to some amazing jam sessions in the beautiful new green tent in Jnane Karwan.

Standardisation, uniformity, matching — these are words that are really a foreign language to us. So I think this is what people like about our place: it’s incredibly personal. We are not Moroccan, but the place has a very strong sense of place.

What are your favourite features across the property?

The property has a lot of elements from the gardens, but there are also many Moroccan touches, like the old doors and the carved-wood alcove in the main sitting room. And then there’s a lot of art — really, a lot of art — which I have carefully curated over the years.

What I particularly love is that the new green tent in Karwan has a fantastic baby grand piano. We’ve already had some amazing artists play there — people who have performed in some of the biggest theatres in the world, who happened to be staying. And because the piano is so good, they would simply sit down and start playing.

I find that incredibly touching. I think that, between the gardens, the old interior elements such as the doors and carved-wood alcoves, the piano and all the paintings I’ve carefully curated, these are the things that really give the property its character.

Your personal style will inspire not just your own generation of leaders but also the upcoming leaders. How would you say you curated your personal style and wardrobe, and what makes you feel confident? What is most important for confidence?

For me, the confidence comes from the fact that I don’t care about trends. I don’t care. You will never see me with any logo. I think the ultimate luxury is to have your own style. No one knows if your logo-less dress or purse is coming from a fantastic shop or brand, or if it’s not, but it looks cool.

I’m fiercely anti-logo. You will never, never, never see me with anything with a big stamp on it. Why would I do free advertising for a brand and, on top of that, have to pay for it? This is something that is beyond my understanding.

My personal style has always been very eclectic, very bohemian and very timeless at the same time. I have dresses that I’ve had for 15 or 20 years, and I still feel just as comfortable in them. And I don’t understand — well, you know, I understand. I think it comes from a lack of confidence when people need to have logos from head to toe. I’m not in search of any social acceptance or anything connected to how much I spend on X, Y or Z. It totally doesn’t even cross my mind.

So I think that my confidence comes from the fact that I don’t need that. And I’ve been blessed with the fact that what I design has been published in New York magazines. It means that it’s not so bad if it’s published in the best places, where they often feature such established interior designers, and for me to also be in there is meaningful.

The same thing with the way I dress. I love — I have designed a collection of jewellery and it was shown in Martha’s Vineyard. Each piece is unique, and I have great fun doing that.

You know, it’s very, I would say, effortless for me to do this because I’m a creative mind. So what could be terrible for me and impossible would be to do anything scientific. Maths, physics, chemistry would be total torture for me. But anything creative is fun, and that’s how I see interior design. That’s how I see clothes, style and accessories: fun.

Customising, creating your own thing — totally fun. And never, never, never go for thinking inside the box or doing what is expected, or matching what is supposed to be matching.

What are your favourite brands and concepts across the world that resonate with you?

Elegant things without their initials on them, in general. And very often, amazing things may not be known by so many people, but they are a powerful statement of elegance.

I also love antiques, and antiques are obviously not branded, except if they are attached to a certain art school or era. Anything with character resonates with me.

What is your advice to female leaders who want to create a unique business like yours?

There are some female leaders who just have access to finance, which has always been a struggle. They have access to finance, but they don’t happen to have the same creativity as I have. They can be brilliant at selling things, where I’m totally hopeless.

But what has helped me is that I can design my own projects from A to Z. I believe this is quite rare in the field of people who want to develop boutique hotels, because they have to hire designers and architects. And for my next projects, which are at a bigger scale, of course, I will be working with two fantastic architects. I guess that I will be quite involved on the interiors side.

But I think it’s a bit of a tricky thing, how I would advise female leaders. Because would they want to get into hospitality? And if they want to get into hospitality as an investment, it’s not going to end up being something as personal as what we do.

They can find a great team, but there will always be this kind of distance between the product and the owner.

We really did something which, I would say, reflects the way we like to live. So we have all these writing retreats, we have music events, we have books everywhere. I mean, the hotel is really an expansion of our own lifestyle.

What makes you love Marrakech the most after all these years?

With Marrakech, the first time I went there was in 1985. I could feel that this place would change my life. It was love at first sight — absolute, irrational, totally, madly in love with the place. And the place has never ceased to enchant me. I’m not at all blasé.

It has evolved in a phenomenal way, because you have parallel lives, you know. There are still many hotels where I couldn’t even sleep one night because they’re not my taste. But I’m happy that there are different tastes out there. Why would one taste decide that it is going to have, like, a dictatorship about taste? That doesn’t make any sense, you know? It doesn’t make sense. There should be a choice of style, a choice of budget, and I think Marrakech is doing this very, very well.

What has really been a key factor is that when I came to Marrakech in ’85, and then ’86, and all the time since, there were only big hotels. And the big hotels — even if you were going, I mean, it’s not everybody who could afford to go to the most famous one, La Mamounia. There are other famous ones now, but La Mamounia remained the historical anchor of Moroccan chic hospitality.

But all these hotels are just, like, phenomenal, but they have a corporate approach to everything. Even though the service is spectacular, there’s a sense that you’re in one big boat, you know?

And it was only when Marrakech started offering a wider range of hospitality styles — and I’m very happy to have been, by coincidence and chronological fact, at the origin of this with the first property I had, which was called Dar Tamazirte — that Marrakech really opened up and brought a lot of people to the city who would never have come before. This paved the way for boutique hospitality in Marrakech.

I had no idea. I just designed a place, which I opened in ’89, that was my dream of the kind of place I would like to find when I travelled, and it became a phenomenon. And one of our first guests was Brad Pitt, and then Sharon, and then Giorgio Armani came many times, and Chanel would book couture shoots in our house, and Donatella, and many European royals, and zillions of other people.

And I think that what makes me love Marrakech so much, for so many years, is that it has evolved into a place where, if you come on your own, discover things, or come with a few friends, you can have a phenomenal experience. And people are super nice.

And what is so phenomenal is that you are connected with a place that’s been here since the Middle Ages, which was a very strong cultural crossroads. And the Moors from Morocco created Andalusia, which they occupied for eight centuries, minus ten years. And it is from the phenomenal cultural aura of Andalusia that now we hear “Spanish colonial” all over Latin America, but it’s not Spanish colonial at all.

After the Moors were kicked back to Africa, it was at the same time that Christopher Columbus went to America. And with him came, and the people after, all the Spanish people who, you know, colonised Latin America and also some parts of the U.S. Their aesthetics, their cultural heritage, were coming from Andalusia. And Andalusia is Arab. I mean, it’s not biased; that’s a fact.

So the fact that Marrakech was at the crossroads of so many cultures, and that its own culture — I mean, Fez and Moroccan culture — is so powerful elsewhere, even if it’s called Spanish colonial, when it should not be called that, but, you know, Moroccan something, I think is very strong in the fact that I love Morocco deeply.

It’s because it has influenced the aesthetics of the world — the architecture, the courtyard, the perspective — in a way which is not getting any credit.