The hedonistic, boho-luxe of 1970s Marrakech is back – here’s how to do it like Mick Jagger and Grace Jones

Grace Jones, Yves Saint Laurent, Jack Kerouac and Jagger – all discovered a world of colour and hedonism in 20th-century Morocco. And now today’s visitors can too, thanks to a riad hotel that’s steeped in history and lined with the legacy of socialite Bill Willis, finds Jessica Rawnsley

Riad hotel IZZA celebrates local Moroccan artists, as well as paying homage to Marrakech’s most famed past visitors (IZZA)

In Marrakech’s dusk-hued medina, there’s a riad that opens a door to another world. The gilded home of the late interior designer and febrile socialite, Bill Willis, Dar Noujoum was once a royal residence, rented to Willis by a prince from the early 1970s until his death in 2009. Stood empty in the ensuing years, it was summarily ransacked – doors stripped of their hand-carved frames, copper piping wrenched from walls, baths hoisted out of windows to the street below. A decade later, Brits and best friends Tim and Neil would discover the riad and, with it, a slice of history.

Exploring the crumbling palace, as Neil hollered for Tim to join him on the roof – the highest in the medina, offering mountain-bound views of the Red City – Tim stumbled upon something astonishing. Two tattered cream suitcases, plastered in travel stickers, overflowing with letters, photographs, sketches.

“I realised we’d stumbled onto a time capsule from that era and the heyday of Marrakech,” he recalls. “I was blown away. It’s the closest that me or anybody I know will ever come to discovering a treasure trove. Actual treasure. I couldn’t believe they had taken everything else and left the best things.”