Jardin Majorelle: a garden made by a painter, saved by a couturier, and finished by two architects

DESIGN TRAVEL · MARRAKECH

Reading time: 9 min

Everyone who has shaped this acre of Marrakech made their living from colour or from cloth. A painter who happened to be the son of France’s greatest Art Nouveau cabinetmaker. A couturier who found it neglected and bought it. And an architecture studio who built its museum out of a woven pattern. That is not a coincidence, and it is why the place looks the way it does.

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The photograph everybody has seen is the blue wall with the cactus in front of it, and it has been reproduced so many times that the garden has become slightly difficult to see.

Which is a shame, because Jardin Majorelle is one of the most deliberately designed acres in North Africa, and the reason it works has almost nothing to do with photogenic colour and almost everything to do with who made it. Three separate people, across a century, each of whom spent their working life on the relationship between colour, material and structure. The garden is what happens when a place is only ever owned by designers.

The blue is a tool, not a decoration

Start with the thing everyone knows, because it is more interesting than its reputation.

Majorelle Blue is an intense cobalt, and Jacques Majorelle cared about it enough to patent it. He took it from the coloured tiles he saw around Marrakech and from the blue of Berber burnouses, so it is a local colour rather than an imported one, which is the first thing worth knowing about it.

The second is what it does. Cobalt blue sits close to the opposite of yellow-green on the colour wheel, which means that when you put it behind a cactus, a bamboo stand or a banana leaf, the green reads as more intensely green than it actually is. The plant has not changed. The wall has done it.

So the blue is not applied to the garden, it is part of the horticulture. Majorelle put it on the villa, on the pergolas, on the pots, on the paths and on the water channels, and every surface carrying it is working on the planting immediately in front of it. A painter built a garden and used the walls the way he would have used the ground of a canvas.

That is a genuinely unusual way to design a landscape. Most gardens treat built structure as the frame and the planting as the picture. Here the two are the same decision.

Jacques Majorelle was the son of Louis Majorelle

Here is the part that almost never appears in coverage of this garden, and it explains everything above.

Jacques Majorelle, born 1886, was the son of Louis Majorelle, one of the defining figures of the École de Nancy and among the greatest French furniture makers of the Art Nouveau period. Louis Majorelle’s work is in every serious survey of the movement: sinuous marquetry, gilt bronze mounts, furniture conceived as a single continuous form.

The son did not make furniture. He became a painter, travelled, and in 1923 bought land on the edge of Marrakech, where he spent the next forty years making a garden.

But look at what he made. The École de Nancy’s central conviction was that a room is one designed system, in which colour, structure, ornament and material are decided together rather than assembled afterwards. Jacques Majorelle applied his father’s discipline to an acre of ground. The blue is the finish, the pergolas are the joinery, the plant collection is the marquetry, and none of the three was decided independently of the others.

He collected across five continents, building a plant list of several hundred species with a particularly serious cactus collection at its heart. He opened the garden to the public in 1947 and used the admission money to maintain it, which is a thoroughly modern arrangement for the 1940s.

The villa is a Cubist building in 1931 Marrakech

The structure at the centre of the garden is worth pausing on, because it is easy to read as backdrop.

In 1931 Majorelle commissioned the architect Paul Sinoir to design him a studio, and what Sinoir produced is a Cubist composition: stacked rectilinear volumes, deep-set openings, a pergola and a cantilevered balcony. Building something that consciously modern in Marrakech in 1931 was not a neutral act, and painting it in the cobalt he had taken from local tilework was the move that reconciled it with where it stood.

The building now houses the Berber Museum, opened in 2011, holding around six hundred objects of Amazigh culture drawn from the Rif to the Sahara: jewellery, textiles, carpets, doors, weapons and domestic objects. It requires a separate ticket and it is worth every dirham, because it puts the material culture that produced Majorelle’s blue in the room next to the garden that uses it.

What is actually growing there

It is worth being specific about the planting, because “exotic” is the word that usually stands in for it and it explains nothing.

Majorelle collected across five continents over four decades, and the result is a plant list running to several hundred species assembled less as a botanical survey than as a palette. The cactus and succulent collection is the serious one and it is the reason the garden holds its structure: cacti are architectural plants, they hold a fixed silhouette year round, and they read as sculpture against a flat coloured wall in a way that a herbaceous border never could. Put a barrel cactus in front of cobalt and you have a composition. Put a rose bush there and you have a mess.

Around them sit bamboo, banana, bougainvillea, palms, agave, yucca and water lilies, layered so that the eye meets three or four depths of foliage at once. That layering is doing the same job as the density of the visitor numbers implies: it makes a small site impossible to see across.

Water runs through in narrow channels and small pools rather than as a feature, which is the Moroccan garden tradition rather than the European one. In a riad or a medina garden, water is heard and glimpsed rather than displayed, and Majorelle followed that instinct even while building something outwardly modern.

The garden also supports more than fifteen bird species endemic to North Africa, which for a walled acre inside a city of over a million people is a genuinely significant number, and it is the clearest evidence that the planting was assembled by somebody who understood habitat as well as colour.

Then a couturier bought it

Majorelle’s later years were difficult for the garden. Following a divorce in the 1950s he sold the property, and after his death in 1962 the site was neglected and fell into disrepair.

In 1980, Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé bought it.

They restored the planting, rebuilt the irrigation, and took the garden from decline to the condition it is in today. Saint Laurent had first come to Marrakech in the 1960s and kept returning, and it is not hard to see why this particular acre held him: a designer who built collections around exact colour relationships walking into a garden organised on the same principle.

When he died in 2008, his ashes were scattered in the rose garden here, and a memorial stands among the planting. It is a quiet corner and most visitors walk past it.

The garden today takes more than 700,000 visitors a year across roughly two and a half acres, which is a considerable load for a site that size, and the reason it does not feel overwhelmed is the density of the planting. You are never looking across the garden. You are always looking into it.

Studio KO made a building out of a textile

The newest layer is the best reason for a design reader to go, and it is the part your itinerary most often misses.

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech opened in October 2017, designed by Studio KO, the practice founded by Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier. It sits a short walk from the garden and it is a 4,000 square metre building whose entire exterior is an argument about cloth.

The facade is terracotta brick, laid so that the surface reads as the warp and weft of woven fabric: bricks projecting and receding in a pattern that produces the texture of a textile at architectural scale, set against volumes in earth-coloured terrazzo. From a distance it is a solid block. From ten metres it is a weave.

Then you go inside, and the argument completes itself. The entrance hall is finished in smooth white, deliberately evoking the velvety lining of a couture jacket, with monochrome stained glass in a Moroccan idiom wrapping the curved lobby wall.

Rough outside, smooth within. That is precisely how a well-made garment works, and building a museum for a couturier on that single principle is one of the most elegant pieces of thinking in recent North African architecture.

The programme is substantial: a 400 square metre permanent gallery showing around fifty couture pieces on rotation, a temporary exhibition space, a research library of more than 6,000 volumes, a 130-seat auditorium lined in oak, a conservation laboratory, a bookshop and a 75-seat café.

How to visit

An hour will get you round the garden. Two hours lets you slow down, which is the point of the place.

Go early. The garden opens before the heat and before the crowds, and the blue behaves differently in low morning light than it does at midday, when the sun flattens it. Late afternoon is the other good window.

Budget for three tickets rather than one: the garden, the Berber Museum inside the villa, and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent nearby. Doing the garden and skipping the museum is the most common mistake, and for anyone interested in design it is the wrong way round.

The bamboo walk is the thing to seek out and the thing photographs never convey, because its effect is acoustic. The density of the canes takes the city out of the air, and the drop in sound as you enter it is more startling than anything visual in the garden.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

There is a version of Jardin Majorelle that exists entirely as a backdrop, and on a busy morning you can watch it being made, one photograph at a time, in front of the same blue wall.

The better version is a hundred years old and rewards being read as a designed object. A painter took a colour off the walls of the city he had moved to, patented it, and used it to make an acre of planting look more alive than it otherwise would. His father had spent a career insisting that a room is a single system, and the son proved the same thing outdoors. A couturier found it neglected, recognised the method, and paid to keep it. And two architects then built a museum next door whose walls are woven.

Four designers, one acre, one idea about colour and material being the same decision. That is why it has lasted, and it is why it is worth more than an hour.