Veere Grenney's enchanting Tangier house, in his own words (2024)

Halfway up Old Mountain in Tangier, my home Gazebo gazes down over a seemingly infinite stretch of brilliant blue, the meeting point of two oceans, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The garden that drops towards the sea is a paradise of towering palms, umbrella pines, plumbago, datura lilies, bougainvillea, agapanthus. Terracotta paths are dappled with shade. A serpentine teucrium hedge forms a line of beauty along one of four terraces and a glass house curves round the base of a eucalyptus. There are pools dark green and milky blue and three springs on the property, one of these providing drinking water said to be sacred. My home here is, for me, the ultimate expression of beauty in the most wonderful location I could ever wish for. Most of all, it is entirely personal. To create this house and garden, I drew on every bit of talent and inspiration I possess. And, at the age of 60, I manifested everything I have learnt over the last 40 years. Gazebo plaits together all the memories, skills, experience and different influences I have absorbed. In each room there is evidence of a life well-travelled, people well met, and beauty assiduously studied. From David Hicks to Syrie Maugham, Felix Harbord to Oliver Messel, Richard Timewell to Christopher Gibbs – they are all here. Then there are the unsung heroes of the place, the Moroccan artisans – carpenters, metalworkers, tilers – who have produced such miraculous work. Finally, Gazebo is animated by the people who work here day to day and by my friends and family who come and stay a while.

Tangier has swum in and out of my life since I first arrived as a wild-haired hippy in 1973. It took me twenty years to come back but I think the exoticism, the light, the play of myriad blues and the innate cosmopolitan quality of the place, must have rooted themselves deep in my imagination. Perched at the very top of Africa, looking out to Gibraltar, the whole city is inconceivably romantic. Islamic architecture prevails, punctuated by the odd art deco building and then, at the centre, the Anglican church of St Andrew of which I am a church warden. This Moorish building was painted by Matisse in Landscape Viewed from a Window. It has the Lord’s Prayer written in Arabic around the nave and is emblematic of the history of tolerance here, where Muslims, Christians and Jews have lived together with reciprocal respect. Artists and art-lovers, socialites and mavericks, adventurers of all description have long been drawn to the cultural climate in Tangier, coupled with the balmy Mediterranean weather. Mohammed Choukri to Walter Harris, William Burroughs to Truman Capote, Edith Wharton and Tennessee Williams to Gore Vidal, Jean Genet and Gertrude Stein are just a few of the roster of those seduced by or belonging to the city.

When I returned to Tangier in the early 1990s, the whole place felt artistic, open and exciting. That first year, the legendary antiques dealer Gordon Watson was here, as was journalist Hamish Bowles, and other friends of theirs like the polymath artist Patrick Kinmonth, photographer Mario Testino and many others. From then on, I came back faithfully each summer and rented Gordon Watson’s house, La Perla. The city was exploding in popularity – new roads, new building – but this area, the Old Mountain, still possessed the quality of an eccentric village peopled by aesthetes. Initially, it was my partner David’s idea to buy something here and in 2009 – having sold a property in Rio – I saw this little house that had been built by Hortense Loeb in the 1930’s. It had been left to her daughter Marguerite, photographer and wife of celebrated Scottish artist James McBey. Marguerite became a society figure in her own right and eventually, passed the place on to the late Joe McPhillips, a charismatic American who ended up as headmaster of the American School in Tangier.

When we first looked at it, Gazebo was simply a neglected cottage on a cliff, with two and half acres of jungle around and in front of it – eucalyptus, wattle and laurel, a shaggy tangle of impenetrable undergrowth. The house itself was a modest stucco-clad building, blue with white shutters, a little bit theatrical, with a slightly Caribbean feel. It had not technically come up for sale but was in a complicated legal situation and my friend Christopher Gibbs who lived opposite helped me secure the place. When I bought it, I had no real plan and definitely no grand vision. All I had in mind was a kind of paradigm, the colonial English Regency house. I love colonial buildings and Regency architecture, particularly 1805 – 1815, is my favourite period. There has always been a group of the aesthetically minded who have revered that period. It was all there in the British decorator and theatre designer Felix Harbord and in the work of Oliver Messel costumier, artist and creator of early homes in Mustique and Barbados. It was there in society photographer Cecil Beaton’s Reddish House and Ashcombe house.

My initial informing principle was that I knew I had to have an internal courtyard so that when the Sharqui wind came in from the east, there would be a still and sheltered place. And I loved the idea of a colonnade. I had been staying in a magnificent house in Dorset that had a Regency loggia off the drawing room; I took every measurement of the arches and columns and we reproduced it to make my colonnade here. But instead of having a solid wall on one side, I created two doors, with a staircase sweeping down into the garden.