As a young starlet, Stephanie Beacham was asked by a reporter from the
Darlington Echo where she was born. She thought Barnet sounded a bit boring.
“So I said Casablanca.” Forty years and a successful international stage and
screen career later, Beacham’s flight of fancy as a 20-year-old turns out to
have an eerie echo.
In March 2005, she travelled with a friend to Morocco to visit her friend’s
daughter in the popular coastal town of Essaouira, 125 miles west of
Marrakesh. Beacham liked what she saw, and by the end of her three-week stay
had bought a property. By the following January, showing something of the
singlemindedness of Sable Colby, the character she played in Dynasty and its
spin-off, The Colbys, the 1980s soaps, she had transformed a humble dwelling
without hot water into a graceful bolt hole.
“Islamic architecture works whether you’re an inch from a building or 100
yards away,” says Beacham. “There is something about the proportions. The
privacy of Islamic architecture is another of its great charms. You get no
idea of the inside from looking at the outside.”
What she saw when she first entered her two-storey riad might have put anyone
else off. At the end of a passage leading from the front door was a
rudimentary lavatory: a simple hose set above a stinking hole in the ground.
“The stench,” says Beacham, “almost literally knocked me back.”
Three families lived in the house, sharing the lavatory and using a single
sink on the first floor as their communal cooking and washing facility. The
riad is unrecognisable today, with its elegant terrace, softly curving
arches, jewel-coloured drapes and furnishings, three double bedrooms, two
bathrooms and an additional storey.
Beacham says her background prepared her well for all the hard work involved
in buying the house and refurbishing it. “If you’ve brought up two children
single-handedly (her former husband, the stage actor John McEnery, left her
when their daughters Phoebe, now 30, and Chloe, 29, were infants), if you
have paid every bill, booked every dental appointment, bought every pair of
new shoes, attended every parent evening and have done so, what’s more,
while building a career, you’ll find yourself with organisational skills to
spare,” she says.
But even Beacham needed a helping hand in Essaouira. Brahim, the Moroccan
boyfriend of her friend’s daughter, introduced her to an associate who knew
of several properties on the market. “You get taken to about 30 different
properties,” says the actress, “and then you find someone else who takes you
to pretty much the same 30 houses.” Two-thirds of the way through this
process, she found the ramshackle riad, dating perhaps from the 16th
century, that seemed to her to offer the most potential for redevelopment.
The house was owned by four brothers and a sister and needed — for reasons she
never quite understood — seven separate signatures before she could acquire
the title to it. Beacham’s trawl round so many properties had given her a
good idea of its market value, so she offered £25,000 for it.
“I also bore in mind that I could afford to lose £25,000 if, as could
conceivably happen, Morocco one day became ‘out of bounds’.” Her approach
was the opposite of what the owners had expected. “I didn’t say, ‘Your house
is a pit and I wouldn’t touch it for a penny more than £25,000.’ What I said
was, ‘I love your house and I’d really like to buy it, but I honestly feel
it’s just not worth more than £25,000.’ And it worked.”
Beacham asked Brahim to be her representative in absentia and signed a
contract detailing his responsibilities at the local town hall. At the end
of her holiday, she flew back to Britain to resume filming Bad Girls, the
television prison saga, leaving him to steer the sale through. By the time
she returned to Morocco two months later, the property was hers.
Next, she hired a femme de ménage (housekeeper) and a “guardian”, a man
responsible for everything from rendering walls to changing light bulbs. She
set up a series of direct debits to pay for utilities — a process, she says,
that involved countless hoops and hurdles — while Brahim found a team of
builders for the project. For the next six months, Beacham commuted busily
between London, Morocco and California (she has a house in Malibu), acting
as her own architect and issuing instructions to the Moroccan builders in
her superior schoolgirl French.
The remodelling process, she estimates, cost a total of £15,000, which
included installing a modern kitchen, two bathrooms, a laundry and a roof
terrace. She reckons she spent another £10,000 visiting Marrakesh to buy
“vastly overpriced” white goods, as well as beds, wooden tables and
wrought-iron tables and chairs. “It was sometimes frustrating trying to
overcome the obstacles of language and culture,” she says. “But within it
all were days of adventure and laughter that I’ll never forget.”
There was the time, for example, when she left the house for only three hours
to go shopping and returned to find that a light-switch had been channelled
and set in the wrong place in a rapidly drying concrete wall. “And on one of
my six visits that year to Essaouira, I was confronted by mosaic tiling in
the kitchen that couldn’t have been more badly assembled. But I had to
accept it as it was. There are occasions when you shouldn’t be taken for a
ride — over the curve of an arch, for example — but this wasn’t one of
them.”
On the other hand, says Beacham, there were many times when the builders
delighted her, making her want to dance with joy. One day she drew a chalk
line on a wall “and in no time at all they’d built a cement staircase,
painted white, that looked as though it had been there since Jesus was a
lad”.
A pair of red velvet curtains that the actress first acquired 35 years ago for
a flat in West Hampstead, and which she’d taken to other properties across
London and to Hollywood, struck her as exactly right for the riad. An
upmarket upholsterer at the end of the Bayswater mews where she now lives in
London gave her a rich array of discarded materials for the house, and she
found the rest in Essaouira itself. “It’s impossible to walk the length of
an alley behind the souk without seeing fabrics being brought to life on
local looms.”
By January last year, Beacham had the house as she wanted it. How long she
continues to own it, though, she really couldn’t say. King Mohamed VI’s
multi-billion-dollar tourism initiative, 2010 Vision, has earmarked six
resorts, including Essaouira, for significant development. Budget airlines,
including Ryanair and EasyJet, are said to have set their sights on flying
direct to the seaside town. The ultimate ambition, says Beacham, is to turn
Essaouira into the St Tropez of Morocco, but the danger, though no hotel can
be built above two storeys, is that it might become its Benidorm instead.
“Either way, I shall lose my anonymity, my ability to sit unnoticed in a
cafe and people-watch.”
In the meantime, as she prepares to tour the UK in a production of Noël
Coward’s Hay Fever, she will rent out Dar Perfecta, as she has called her
riad. “I don’t believe houses should be left empty,” she says, not that
she’s overly sentimental about the properties that she’s acquired. “I’m now
interested in the next challenge. I’ve got my eye on South America.”
Leafing through an album of photographs that charted the progress of her house
in Essaouira, she recently came across the following adage clipped from a
newspaper. “It’s not because things are difficult that we do not dare,” it
says. “It is because we do not dare that things are difficult.”
Dar Perfecta, www.villarenters.com
On the market
Renovated by an interior designer, this large traditional riad in the heart of
the Essaouira medina has three bedrooms, a large bedroom suite on one floor,
a ground floor living room and two sun terraces. It is for sale for £245,000
through Atlas Immobilier, 00 21 224 422 672, www.atlasimmobilier.com
In the old town of Essaouira, this renovated townhouse in the medina has four
bedrooms, three bathrooms, three living rooms and two staples of traditional
Moroccan style — a roof terrace and tiled courtyard with a fountain. It is
for sale for £197,000 through Karimo Immobilier, 00 21 224 474 500, www.karimo.net
A pretty riad in Essaouira old town, arranged around a traditional tiled
central courtyard. There are three bedrooms, three bathrooms, a first-floor
living room with an open fireplace and two terraces. It is for sale for
£93,000 through Atlas Immobilier, 00 21 224 422 672, www.atlasimmobilier.com
A three-bedroom, three-bathroom riad in the heart of the Essaouira medina has
a living room with an open fire, a fitted kitchen and a roof terrace. It may
need some modernisation and updating.
It is on the market for £108,000 through Karimo Immobilier, 00 21 224 474 500, www.karimo.net
