Set within a hectare of palm grove in Tameslouht, seventeen kilometres from Marrakech, Palais Freedom is a private villa designed by Atelier3H and completed in 2023. The programme comprises a 1,000 m² main building and ten suites.
The brief carried a double demand: an owner's residence, and a guest house built to receive. Private receptions and celebrations, working stays and seminars, families hosted in full exclusivity — three regimes of use that call for different thresholds, different scales, different degrees of intimacy.
The project articulates a low principal volume in ochre render — a direct chromatic echo of the Haouz plain floor — alongside satellite pavilions linked by reflecting pools. Vertical brise-soleil of varying geometry and corten steel walls filter the raking light and structure the façades: their cast shadow, shifting through the day, becomes a compositional element in its own right.
The programme is unusual for a villa. A twenty-metre heated pool, a hammam in hand-cut zellige, a sauna, a private cinema, a modular seminar room, padel and pickleball courts — a density that belongs to the vocabulary of the palace hotel. Concentrating it into a single volume would have produced mass. Atelier3H did the opposite: disperse the volumes. Every suite keeps its own line of sight toward the Atlas and its own autonomy; the collective spaces unfold without ever compromising the retreat of the bedrooms.
The garden, a Mediterranean xeriscape of centenary olive trees, agaves, lavender and grasses, extends the bioclimatic logic of the building and sharply reduces irrigation demand.
Atelier3H is an architecture practice founded in 2014 in Casablanca by Hamza Bouzoubaa. The firm designs ultra-high-end villas, luxury residential projects and hospitality programmes for an international private clientele — across Morocco (Casablanca, Marrakech, Tangier, Dakhla), Francophone Africa and the Gulf. Its work pairs rigorous contemporary architecture with a distinctly Moroccan material grounding: earth renders, zellige, local stone, corten steel.
