“What I really love about the riad is that you can walk around all its four sides and overlook the courtyard,” Verkade says, as we continue our tour. “That’s actually quite rare, as most are built next to another building with a wall on one side.” Upstairs, we pause on a balcony overlooking the courtyard. “This is my favourite spot,” she says, before throwing open a set of intricately carved black and gold doors, made locally in the city using a historic Syrian technique, which guard her bedroom (one of the house’s four suites). The walls have been stained a beguiling rose pink, using a Moroccan dye. Below our feet: a hand-stitched leather floor crafted by a local artisan Trino fondly calls “Mr Magic”. I spy a swathe of hand-painted silk, depicting exotic birds sitting in a tree, next to the four-poster bed. “It was left over from an old Alexander McQueen show,” she says. “He gave it to me years ago, and I thought it would look good in here, so I finally had it framed.”
We enter the “yellow room” (my favourite of the bedrooms), which features seductive ochre tadelakt walls and a chalky black floor. The scalloped bed frame is nothing short of a masterpiece. “I bought it in 2012 when I first started working at Thom Browne in New York and I had it upholstered in an Alexander McQueen fabric,” Verkade says. The black and white embroidered bedspread was made by three local women and took four weeks to complete by hand.
