best hotels of the world( Hotel Nord-Pinus Tanger Tangier, Morocco )

Small Hotel. Tangier is fast recapturing the glamour of its glory days, and with the opening of this five-room riad, located along the seawall of the casbah, the Old Town finally has the chic little inn it deserves. French hotelier Anne Igou spent 16 months restoring an 18th-century pasha’s palace, and while most area properties predictably emphasize their Moroccan settings, Igou’s hotel reflects her own whimsical style. Here, North African fabrics and antiques (chandeliers from a Syrian mosque and Egyptian inlaid chests) share space with comtemporary leather armchairs by Jacques Adnet and Charlotte Perriand gooseneck lamps. The hotel is a work in progress—which is both good and bad. The traditional dining room is not quite up to speed, and we missed the presence of an authentic hammam, but Igou’s penchant for constantly updating the design—a Venetian lamp here, a Braque lithograph there—reflects the vibrancy of the ever-evolving streets beyond the hotel’s hand-carved doors.