El Fenn at Broadwick Soho: you cannot move a view, so you move everything else

DESIGN TRAVEL · LONDON

Reading time: 11 min

Until 31 August, the rooftop at Broadwick Soho is being run as an outpost of El Fenn, the art hotel behind the walls of the Marrakech medina. It sounds like a lot to explain and it comes down to one design question. On a rooftop, inside or out, the perimeter belongs to the city and cannot be packed into a crate. So what is left to bring?

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Flute, the rooftop bar on top of Broadwick Soho in London, has been handed over for the summer to El Fenn in Marrakech, and dressed, hung, fed and soundtracked as an extension of that hotel’s own roof terrace. It runs from 25 June to 31 August 2026, and it is called a residency.

That word is borrowed, and knowing where from makes the format much easier to read. A residency in art is when an institution gives a maker its rooms for a fixed period and lets them work. A residency in music is a run of nights in one venue rather than a tour. In both cases the point is the same: somebody else’s identity temporarily occupies your space, on your dates, with your equipment, and then leaves.

Hotels have started doing it because a hotel is unusually well suited to it. A restaurant that hosts a guest chef changes its menu. A hotel that hosts another hotel can change the menu, the furniture, the art on the walls, the music and the smell of the room at the same time.

Which raises the design question that makes this project interesting. Both of these hotels are known above all for their roofs. El Fenn’s 14,000 square foot terrace looks over the medina towards the Koutoubia Mosque with the Atlas Mountains behind it. Flute looks over Soho. Neither view is going anywhere.

So the exercise is a genuinely useful one to watch: when the single most defining feature of a space cannot travel, what actually carries?

Why the roof is the only part of a hotel that could do this

The answer starts with an observation about the perimeter.

Flute is not a single space. Like most good rooftops it works as an enclosed room and an open terrace, used together, and a residency has to hold in both conditions: under glass and under sky, in daylight and after dark.

What the two halves have in common is the thing that makes the whole exercise possible. On a rooftop, the walls are the view. Where the perimeter is open it is a parapet and a skyline. Where it is enclosed it is glazed, which means the wall is a window and the window is Soho. Either way the edge of the room belongs to the city outside it, and there is almost nothing there to decorate.

Everywhere else in a hotel the opposite is true. You could not move El Fenn’s bedrooms to Soho, because their character is tadelakt, zellige, hand-carved cedar and marble, applied to walls that belong to specific riads in a specific medina. Take those walls away and there is no room left.

A rooftop is the one part of a hotel where that dependency is reversed. Its character has to live in what is placed inside the perimeter, which is to say in the floor, the furniture, the textiles, the things hung overhead and the light. Every one of those fits in a crate.

So the residency is not a copy of El Fenn. It is a demonstration of the part of El Fenn that is portable, and working out which part that is turns out to be the actual design work.

What travels: stripes, lanterns and a shadow

The visual language arriving on Flute is specific, and each element is chosen for a reason that holds up.

The signature red and white stripes. A stripe is the most portable pattern there is, because it is scale-independent and it works at any distance. It reads across a terrace, in a photograph, on a cushion and on an awning, and it does not need a wall to sit on. It is also the one motif that survives being seen in bright sun, which matters on a roof in either city.

Enormous suspended Moroccan lanterns. This is the cleverest move in the scheme, and it is the one element that does a different job in each half of the rooftop. Outside there is no ceiling at all, and a hanging lantern invents one, creating a height, a centre and a boundary in a space that has none of those things. Inside there is a ceiling already, usually a low one or a glazed one, and a lantern at that scale claims it, pulling the eye down off the structure and giving the room a proportion it did not have. After dark both versions do the same second job: pierced metal throws pattern onto surfaces rather than simply emitting light, so the whole rooftop acquires a decorated ceiling that exists only at night and is made entirely of shadow.

Bold prints and bespoke tables. Furniture made for the residency rather than hired for it is the difference between a takeover and a theme. A table drawn for a specific terrace fixes the plan, and everything else arranges itself around the tables.

Put those three together and you have a complete recipe for changing a room without touching the building: a pattern that works at any scale, an object that claims the space overhead, and furniture that sets the plan. It is transferable, and it holds whether you are dressing a hotel rooftop, a garden room or a small terrace at home.

Two hotels built the same way from opposite directions

The pairing works because the two properties share a method, even though they were made in completely different ways.

El Fenn opened in 2004 with six bedrooms in a single riad, founded by Vanessa Branson and Howell James. It grew outwards into neighbouring buildings, and it now runs to 41 rooms and suites across a group of interconnected houses on a two acre site behind the rose-coloured walls of the medina, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are three pools, a spa, two restaurants, a boutique and that roof terrace. The name means art in Arabic, and the building holds one of the most substantial contemporary art collections in Morocco. In 2017 the artist and designer Madeline Weinrib and Graham Head, formerly president of ABC Carpet and Home, joined as co-owners.

Broadwick Soho opened in autumn 2023, a 57 key hotel at 20 Broadwick Street conceived by a group of friends around owner Noel Hayden’s memories of his family’s hotel, with Jo Ringestad, Joshua Gardner, Andrea Gelardin and Jamie Poulton. The interiors were the first London hotel by Martin Brudnizki, and they fuse English eccentricity, Jazz Age opulence and disco-chic across an eclectic art collection, the Italian-inspired restaurant Dear Jackie, street-level Bar Jackie and Flute on the roof.

One was assembled over twenty years and the other was composed in one go, and they arrived at the same place. Both are maximalist. Both are art-led rather than art-decorated. Both were made by groups of friends rather than by a brand standard. That is a real kinship rather than a marketing one, and it is why the residency reads as a conversation instead of a costume.

Vanessa Branson has put the connection in terms of feeling: that El Fenn has always been about more than a stay, and that bringing that specific Marrakech magic to a space as bold and beautiful as Flute feels like a natural kinship of spirits. Joshua Gardner, managing director of Broadwick Soho, frames it from the London end as a vibrant cultural moment rooted in creativity and colour, without leaving the city.

The art is the substance, and it is the part most likely to be missed

Everything above is atmosphere. The exhibition is the reason to actually go.

It has been curated by Hassan Hajjaj with Atay Atelier, and it shows two photographers working in Morocco now.

Hajjaj is the right person to curate a show about one city inhabiting another, and the credit line on his own work explains why better than any biography could. The piece from his private archive that greets guests on the ground floor is Rubbish Odalisque, dated 2010/1431.

Those are the same year, counted twice. 2010 in the Gregorian calendar, 1431 in the Hijri. Hajjaj dates his work in both, which is a quietly radical thing to do and a completely accurate description of his own position: born in Morocco in 1961, resident in London since his teens, working between the two ever since. His portraits do the same thing visually, setting Moroccan sitters against souk fabrics, luxury logos and their obvious fakes, in frames built from tins of food. He was shortlisted for the V&A’s Jameel Prize in 2009, won the Sovereign Middle East and African Art Prize in 2011, showed La Caravane at Somerset House in 2017 and was made an Officer of the Order of National Merit by King Mohammed VI in 2016.

An artist who dates his work in two calendars at once is exactly the person to hang a Marrakech rooftop in Soho.

The two photographers he and Atay Atelier have chosen are deliberately unalike.

Ismail Zaidy works from his family’s rooftop studio in Marrakech, and his photography is defined by a dreamlike minimalism, built from textiles and solitary figures. Read that again, because it is the best coincidence in the project. The work was made on a rooftop, by a photographer whose studio is a rooftop, in a city where the roof is where domestic life actually happens, and it is being shown on a rooftop in London. Zaidy is largely self-taught, works under the name L4artiste and frequently uses his own family as his subjects, which is what gives the pictures their stillness.

Fatimazohra Serri works from Nador, in the north, and provides the counterweight. Her photography deals with femininity, identity and the body in conservative surroundings, and it is thoughtful rather than declarative. Putting her alongside Zaidy gives the show two registers instead of one mood, which is what separates a curated exhibition from a decorative hang.

The works on the terrace are for sale, which is worth saying plainly. A rooftop bar that is also a selling show is an unusually direct piece of patronage, and it is consistent with what El Fenn has done since 2004, when Vanessa Branson opened an art hotel and, the following year, founded the Marrakech Biennale, which ran for six editions.

Flavours, sound and a shop

The rest of the programme is what makes it a residency rather than an exhibition with drinks.

The food is built for grazing rather than for courses, which is the correct format for a roof: traditional batbout with smoked aubergine zaalouk, crisp lamb briouats with smoked paprika labneh, and charcoal-grilled octopus, alongside El Fenn’s own cocktails including the Hibiscus Margarita, the El Fenn Mule and the Marrakech Negroni.

The sound is a rotating roster of DJs and musicians working with North African-influenced material, from traditional rhythms through to modern desert blues.

The talks are the part worth planning around. A programme of art conversations runs through the summer, with Vanessa Branson among the speakers, on Moroccan heritage and contemporary creativity.

And there is a shop, with limited-edition tote bags, caps and T-shirts alongside Moroccan coasters, playing cards and printed postcards.

None of that is incidental. A hotel residency is a total sensory brief by definition, because the thing being transplanted is not a room, it is an atmosphere, and atmosphere is assembled from light, colour, smell, taste and sound at once.

Why it is happening now

There is a piece of context that explains the timing, and it is not in the invitation.

El Fenn joined AKAN, a Moroccan collection, in November 2025. AKAN was created by the Benabbés-Taarji family, whose roots in Marrakech run five generations, and it holds a group of boutique hotels each with its own identity. Vanessa Branson, who remains as founder and brand ambassador at large, has described handing over the leadership as both a privilege and the biggest adventure of her life.

A hotel that has just changed hands after twenty years has a specific question to answer, and it is a design question rather than a commercial one: what is the thing that has to survive the transition?

Sending the roof to London for a summer is a very direct way of answering it. Strip the hotel of its building, its city, its view and its climate, keep only what fits in a crate, and see whether it still reads as itself. On the evidence of the stripes, the lanterns and the two photographers, it does.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The useful thing here is not the novelty of one hotel visiting another. It is what the exercise exposes.

Ask what a place is made of and the answer usually starts with the building. On a rooftop the walls are the view, so the building stops answering, and you find out how much of the character was ever in the architecture at all. In El Fenn’s case, a surprisingly small amount of it. What makes that terrace what it is turns out to be a stripe, a hanging lantern, a table drawn for the spot it stands in, a set of photographs by people working in Morocco now, and a smell of smoked paprika. All of which travel.

That is a real lesson for anyone designing a room whose perimeter is glass or sky, at any scale. You will never control the view and you will rarely control the light. What you control is what you hang, what you sit on and what you put on the table, and on a rooftop those three decisions are the whole design.

It closes on 31 August, and the two photographers are the part to go for.