The rich and famous are flocking to own their share of Morroco's fractional residences

Source: timesonline.co.uk

This Moroccan villa was built for a nightlife king, but now you’re invited to the party

Birley Villa, Morocco by John Arlidge

Mark adored the view from here,” says Lynn Guinness as she looks through the olive groves and down the palm-lined Ourika Valley, where she lives, to the Atlas Mountains and remembers her old friend and neighbour, the late Mark Birley, creator of some of London’s best-known clubs and restaurants, including Annabel’s and Harry’s Bar.

Inside the 10,000 sq ft, coral-pink Casa Birley, the designer Nicky Haslam is telling Kit Harrison, the former UBS banker and round-the-world yachtsman, why a pared-down look is le style correct for the interior. “I don’t want to go too Moroccan, even though we’re in Morocco,” he says. “The Moroccan look has been so overdone - you can buy it in Esher.”

Here, on a soupy late-summer morning, are a member of Ireland’s banking and brewing dynasty, the designer-cum-court jester to the international swanning classes and a monied man of derring-do. Welcome to one funky cool medina - and what might become a fitting tribute to London’s king of clubs.

Birley, who also established Mark’s Club and George, first saw the house three years ago when he was visiting Guinness, an old friend, and her business partner, the developer Francis Pike, Birley’s former son-in-law. Pike married Birley’s daughter, India Jane, but the pair later separated. “Mark was always coming over,” Guinness recalls. “He loved everything about Morocco: the light, the architecture, the peace, the climate.”

The house, on the Ferme de Saladin, just outside Marrakesh, was being built from scratch. Pike had intended to live in it himself, but Birley persuaded him to sell for €2m. “I remember Mark saying, ‘At my time of life, I don’t want to wait for another property as good as this to come up,’ ” Guinness says.

Birley and India Jane, a designer who had styled Annabel’s, drew up plans for a sweeping, lantern-lit driveway made of crushed white marble, leading to a huge Arabic arched door that opened onto a courtyard with a vaulted terracotta-brick ceiling. Off the courtyard would be a kitchen, a dining room, a breakfast room and a salon d’été with an enormous day bed. The five bedrooms were all to have bathrooms with traditional beaten-steel hand basins and terraces overlooking the five-acre garden. The swimming pool and pool house, with kitchen, would be set amid the olive groves. Alongside the main house, there would be a smaller guest house that could sleep six. “It was typical Mark,” Guinness says. “He was such a perfectionist - he wanted every detail to be just right.”

Sadly, Birley died last year, aged 77, just as the exterior was being finished and the interior decoration was about to start. The house was put up for sale, but his legacy will live on: Casa Birley is the first property bought by Botiga, a new British-based company that joins the growing number of upmarket fractional-ownership clubs, providing a modern twist on the old and largely discredited timeshare formula.

The idea behind Botiga is simple. Rather than owning a holiday property outright, with all the attendant inflexibility, hassle and cost, wealthy types invest in a club that buys a number of homes around the world on their behalf, in a variety of locations - beach, mountain, town and country - short-haul and long-haul.

Members pay annual dues that are converted into points, which they can then use to claim a certain number of weeks per year in the properties. In an important contrast to timeshare schemes, members own a share of the club and benefit from the growth in value of the property portfolio - if prices rise, that is, far from guaranteed given the global property slowdown.

It’s not cheap. Basic membership of Botiga, guaranteeing 4-6 weeks’ holiday a year, costs between £225,000 and £450,000, plus up to £28,000 in annual dues. Factor in the cost of having your money tied up in the scheme and a week at Casa Birley works out at about £8,400, including fees - although the property has room for 18 people. Harrison, 35, Botiga’s co-founder, claims this is less than half the cost of renting a similar property on the open market.

Marrakesh is an appropriate place to launch Botiga. Thanks to public and private property investors, the city is becoming an haute bourgeois bohemian retreat, a generation after it was “discovered” by John Paul Getty and Yves Saint Laurent. Private investors - among them Richard Branson and his sister Vanessa, the Michelin-starred British chef Richard Neat and the Glaswegian gangster-turned-sculptor Jimmy Boyle - are building some of the grandest estates and villas within a few hours’ flying time of London.

Vanessa Branson runs chic Riad El Fenn, in the medina, while her brother’s stylish Kasbah Tamadot is just out of town in the foothills of the Atlas. Neat has interests in riads and guesthouses all over the city, while Boyle has developed a dozen desert mansions. One new property, Dar JL, a giant three-villa estate developed by the Scandinavian multi-millionaire John Larson, is the new “in the know” place to stay for the Wallpaper-reading classes.

The world’s biggest property firms and hoteliers are also greening the dusty desert. Rocco Forte is developing the 80-villa Assoufid, five miles outside the city, where prices start at £1.2m. The British estate agencies Hamptons and Knight Frank have sold 40 modern townhouses and villas, built around a Four Seasons hotel. Hermès, the French luxury-goods group, is fashioning a hotel and spa, with 60 luxury flats, and Aman Resorts has constructed 16 freehold villas amid the citrus groves beside its Aman-jena hotel.

Marrakesh is not the only sector of the Moroccan market that is booming. The coastal towns and cities, from Essaouira to Tangier, are seeing an explosion in development. The beachfront, however, is a very different beast. Developments there are bigger, cheaper and designed to appeal to what developers call “a more international clientele”, but Marrakesh types loftily dismiss as the “Costa del Couscous brigade”.

Most of these resorts are being built by the fast-expanding property firms of Dubai and Qatar. Emaar, the firm behind the Burj Dubai, which will be the world’s tallest skyscraper when finished next year, is investing £3.5 billion in Morocco, with three coastal developments planned – Saphira, Tinja and Bahia Bay. Qatari Diar, an investment company, is behind the £300m, 200-villa Al Houara Beach Resort and Spa in Tangier.

The hotelier Sol Kerzner is also joining the Moroccan camel train by building the Mazagan Resort, on the coast near Casablanca. Pride of place goes to the 150 luxury villas and the Gary Player golf course. “Easy air access from the UK, and the climate, make this ideal holiday-home territory,” Kerzner says. Prices start at about £700,000.

The coast has attracted the likes of the Manchester United defender Rio Ferdi-nand and his teammate Gary Neville, as well as the Chelsea and England captain, John Terry. It’s all a far cry from the “très correct” company on the terrace of Casa Birley – which is exactly the way Botiga’s Kit Harrison wants it. “We think we have the best of Morocco,” he says. “Mark Birley bought this house, and we are determined that his spirit will live on.”

It looks as though he might be right. On the strength of the Birley villa alone, Hugo Bulmer, of the cider family, has bought into Botiga, as has Michael Spencer, the billionaire treasurer of the Conservative party, through his private family trust. “I hope, I think,” Harrison says, “that Mark would have approved.”

Fractional ownership: do your sums

With timeshare out of fashion, developers have been looking for new ways to sell stakes in holiday properties. Pioneered in America and aimed largely at the affluent, the formula allows people to buy a certain number of weeks per year in a property. Unlike timeshare, however, it gives buyers a share of the title, so they can benefit from any rise in the value of the property (although they will also suffer if the price goes down).

And why confine yourself to a single home? The formula is being adapted by proeprty clubs such as botiga to allow people a stake in a series of usually high-end destinations across the globe. Geoffrey Kent, founder of Abercrombie & Kent, is also planning to use his existing portfolio of villas to create an upscale club of his own.

Before buying into any such scheme, read the small print - and factor in all the fees and costs, which can be considerable. There may also be restrictions on when you can sell - and a limited pool of potential buyers.

The biggest challenge for all these clubs is getting enough rich folk to join, fast. those that acquire a "critical mass" of investors first, then use the funds rasied to buy cannily, are likely to succeed. Those that don't, won't.

Botiga: 020 3326 4000