#000602
Moroccan Interiors
Lisa Lovatt-Smith
A lavish full-color survey of Moroccan domestic design, part of Taschen's popular Interiors series. Lisa Lovatt-Smith takes the reader through some forty properties, from restored palaces in the medina of Marrakesh to modest fishermen's houses, capturing the range of a design idiom built on tilework, carved plaster and cedar, courtyards, lanterns, and saturated color under North African light. Each interior is photographed generously and accompanied by short descriptive text in English, French, and German. It sits squarely in the coffee-table tradition — long on visual pleasure, lighter on scholarship — but as a source of atmosphere and ideas it is rich and enduringly popular, a fixture on the shelves of designers and armchair travelers drawn to the Mediterranean-meets-Sahara aesthetic.
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The author
Lisa Lovatt-Smith is a design writer and editor who has lived across Europe and produced several volumes in Taschen's Interiors series, including Provence Interiors. Her role here is that of curator and guide, selecting and framing a wide range of Moroccan homes rather than writing a historical treatise.
The book
Moroccan Interiors was first published by Taschen in 1995, with later editions following. Its roughly 320 lavishly illustrated pages present about forty interiors — grand and humble — with trilingual captions.
How it reads
As a beautiful, browsable design book. Its strength is the photography and the breadth of homes surveyed; its limit is depth, since the text is descriptive rather than analytical. For inspiration, mood, and a sense of Moroccan decorative vocabulary it delivers handsomely; readers wanting the craft history or cultural context of zellij, tadelakt, and riad architecture will need to look further.
For more context
Dedicated studies of Moroccan craft and architecture supply the scholarship the format omits.
Sources - Moroccan Interiors — Taschen series, Goodreads - Moroccan Interiors (1995) — Biblio
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Lisa Lovatt-Smith
- Publisher
- Taschen
- Place of publication
- Cologne
- Year
- 1995
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado