One hundred years of luxury and secrets at La Mamounia, the favorite hideaway from Churchill to the Kardashians

“Gardens? Who cares about gardens?… Jacques Majorelle?… Yves Saint Laurent? “We are in the best hotel in the world, why are we going out?” The phrase is said with disdain and drinking a glass of champagne by Anna Delvey (actually, Sorokin), a character in the series produced by Netflix Inventing Anna, which tells the story of one of the most illustrious scammers so far in the 21st century. In May 2017, Anna, the supposed heiress of a German art collector, arrived with three friends at La Mamounia and several bad credit cards, and booked one of the hotel's three most expensive riads: 700 square meters of carpeted luxury. Persians, private pool and lush gardens. The perfect light, precise shadows and a pleasant sound of water fountains everywhere. Two days later all the alarms had gone off. The level of spending at riad number 3 was very high and the cards did not pass. The very discreet service of the hotel, in sixth position on the list of the 50 best hotels in the world in 2023, made the alleged VIP guest aware of the irregularities and asked for another payment method, but she had come from deceiving the elite New Yorker, she threatened loudly to complain, call her father and leave, angry but by helicopter, to the nearest airport. “I remember those management advice that always started with the same point: 'The riad 3 card does not pass.' I was the first to detect that something was not right,” says Pierre Jochem, general director of the hotel.

The young woman had swindled the most select of the Western financial and intellectual class, but Marrakesh and La Mamounia were the beginning of the end of her card empire. The total expense of the stay, $62,000 (about 57,000 euros), ended up being charged to a corporate card of the magazine Vanity Fair that one of her friends contributed to get out of Morocco, and that episode was one of the incriminating facts in the fraud trial that took place in New York in May 2019.

The events occurred in 2017, the Netflix series premiered in 2022 and La Mamounia turned 100 years old in 2023. By then many people on the internet were wondering if the luxury hotel where Anna had gone to live her last dream of greatness was real. An Arab palace with 209 keys, inaugurated in 1923, with mosaic floors, cordovan furniture and mysterious musharabiah shutters, a garden from another world. The perfect light and a date every night on the bedside table to activate the metabolism before going to bed…, that seemed like something out of the imagination of some good Netflix scriptwriter. But no, it was the platform itself that reported that not only did the hotel exist, but that chapter six of the series, called 'Another Kind of Friends', had been filmed precisely in the riad booked with the card without funds. Anna. In terms of marketing it seemed like a perfect operation, but when we visited La Mamounia last November many employees still remembered the tension of those days in May 2017. “I don't know how they do it in Paris or New York, but in Morocco if someone wants to leave Without paying, the police are called,” says Denys Courtier, regional, commercial and marketing director of the hotel.

The truth is that the hotel has celebrated its first 100 years at the aspirational peak of at least a generation that until the Netflix series had barely heard of La Mamounia, and that sympathizes more with Khloé Kardashian and Netflix than with Winston Churchill or Charles Chaplin, two of the illustrious guests that the hotel boasts. When Pierre Jochem says that he would not like La Mamounia to end up becoming a museum for nostalgic people, I remind him that with this type of shock The Grand Dame -as it is known in Marrakech- is guaranteed cardiovascular health, freshness and eternal youth for at least another 100 years.

Arriving at La Mamounia is putting one foot in history and another in transcendence. Many legends of cinema, music, and politics have slept here. Alfred Hitchcock; General De Gaulle, who had a bed made to measure his 1.96 meters; the Rolling Stones; Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in their good times, and Cristiano Ronaldo. Perhaps the smell is the last thing you forget about this place: an aroma of dates and bitter orange created exclusively for the hotel by perfumer Olivia Giacobetti—a regular at brands such as Diptyque and Penhaligon's—that immediately puts distance from the outside world. What happens at La Mamounia stays at La Mamounia, they say, but that smell, even if you can take it home in candle or vaporizer format, is only perceived again among the maroon velvets of the hotel. Clothing that confers solidity, darkness and mystery to this place that, probably because of that discretion, quickly became the favorite of many politicians with excellent taste.

Winston Churchill, great and bon vivant, was one of the first to discover La Mamounia. At some point in the 1940s he decided to establish his winter quarters here to work, of course, and also to paint from a balcony facing Mount Atlas and Koutoubia. By the way, hearing the prayers calling the faithful to the mosque is one of the many luxuries that no one announces when you arrive at the hotel. We entered a replica of the room of one of the most prominent politicians of the 20th century. In the most radical renovation of the hotel, completed in 2010 by interior designer Jacques Garcia, it was decided to open a suite in tribute to its most famous visitor. Or, at least, the one who settled there for longer periods. The suite is reached by going down some stairs and, if compared to the opulence outside, it is even sober, but with privileged views over the olive and orange trees that the president painted so many times. By the way, Brad Pitt also visited one of the hotel's three riads during his good years with Angelina Jolie. As a souvenir, he gave his then-wife the Churchill painting. Koutoubia Mosque Tower. When things went badly, Angelina auctioned it at Christie's for 9.6 million euros. Churchill, a big whiskey drinker, also names a bar in La Mamounia, Le Churchill. He deserves it because the politician used to say without embarrassment: “The only thing I can say is that I have gotten much more out of alcohol than alcohol has out of me.”

To celebrate the centenary, La Mamounia again hung the construction sign in 2020. This time those responsible for the renovation were the architects Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku, who counted on the hands of 300 local artisans who worked on the Centennial lamp , a jewel of tears sculpted in glass by Berber artists. When we were at the hotel it was hidden behind a thick velvet curtain and guarded 24 hours a day by several employees. We couldn't photograph it. It was revealed a week later at the big 100th birthday party.

Currently the cheapest room does not go below six hundred or so euros, and the United States (specifically California and New York) is the country where most of La Mamounia's visitors come from. France, England and Morocco follow, then Spain and Switzerland. Hotel sources report that Brazil is beginning to emerge in the market, along with Mexico, which is the country that is growing the most.

All paths of luxury, classic, extravagant and twisted lead to La Mamounia. Turning 100 years old and still being an object of desire is a privilege that few can boast of in volatile times where everything lasts a short time and passes quickly, and in an industry, that of luxury, with clients who “spend more and more money, but they are more difficult, demanding and impatient,” in Jochem's words.

If in 1943, after the Casablanca Conference, an invitation from Churchill to Roosevelt—“come to the most beautiful place in the world”—put the hotel at the epicenter of the global luxury imagination, in 2022 it has become a global Netflix hit. In the end the result is the same: everyone wants to come here before they die. Courtier says it's not the same. He says, not without some chagrin, that many people come into the hotel, take a selfie and leave. “They don't look around, they don't see, they don't appreciate anything.” He says with even more disgust that “very important financiers” are on the waiting list to reserve the riad. Inventing Anna. The world has changed. “It's decadence,” laments the hotel's commercial director, but at La Mamounia we have Churchill's suite and we are not going to pay tribute to a scammer, we are not going to have Anna's suite. “That is simply not going to happen.” That at 100 years old someone continues to talk about you with such passion can only be a good sign.

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