Nobu Hotel Marrakech

After a few nights perfecting our haggling skills in the medina, we immediately lost all bargaining power the moment we told taxi drivers our next destination. 'Nobu?' Cue a raised eyebrow and the kind of fare we’re more used to seeing back in London. Turns out luxury hotels do absolutely nothing for your negotiating credibility.

Checking into Nobu Hotel Marrakech felt like arriving in an entirely different country — one with a sleek, circular lobby, and a Louis Vuitton store next door, in case you’d forgotten your designer handbag. I had a feeling we wouldn’t be doing much haggling here.

Rooms blend Nobu’s modern Japanese aesthetic with Moroccan touches — all clean lines, dark woods and a satisfyingly shiny marble bathroom. Ours came with a birthday cake waiting under a glass cloche for Mr Smith’s big 4-0, and with no darling offspring around to 'help', we polished off the whole thing before heading out to explore our surroundings.

There are no fewer than three pools at the hotel. The ground-floor one is essentially decorative — we didn’t see a single person risk the faux pas of actually swimming in it. It’s clearly been designed for breakfast posing, which I fully embraced while eating smoked-salmon vol-au-vents at 9am and drizzling everything with local argan oil like it was a health tonic.

Everyone knows the real star of the trio is the circular rooftop pool: serene until noon, buzzing by late afternoon, and mercifully free of 7am towel-reservation warfare. Meanwhile, the basement pool is the yin to its yang — moodily lit and warm as bath water, so quiet that Mr Smith and I found ourselves whispering to each other. Quite the contrast to the vibe-y rooftop above.

Speaking of which, the Pearl Spa is enormous — a maze of treatment rooms, a hammam, a Jacuzzi and an ultra-Zen relaxation area I appreciated for approximately five minutes before the roof’s gravitational pull won. I booked a massage described as 'invigorating', which turned out to mean 'firm enough to realign several past lives'. This might explain why my therapist offered me the choice of soft or medium pressure on arrival, to which I confidently answered, 'Hard, please'. Consider yourself warned.

Around the rooftop pool, staff drift past with trays of snacks (including sushi, of course), while we lazily rotate between loungers and hanging egg chairs, occasionally interrupted by the music pausing for the call to prayer — a gentle reminder that we’re still in Marrakech, not Miami.

For Mr Smith’s big birthday feast, the hotel's Nobu restaurant was the obvious choice. Familiar, sleek, comfortingly predictable in all the best ways. The iconic black cod miso arrives exactly as it does in London, only somehow more atmospheric, knowing the Atlas Mountains are just a drive away. Halfway through dinner, we’re treated to an impromptu dance performance featuring more feathers than a Strictly Come Dancing finale. It’s the kind of spectacle that oddly makes perfect sense after a couple of cocktails.

Keen to include a bit of the 'real' Marrakech, we walked it off with a sunset stroll through Parc Lalla Hasna, cutting across manicured paths towards the Koutoubia Mosque before ending up at El Fenn for (yet more) rooftop drinks. We’re nothing if not predictable. 

As hotel stays go, Nobu Hotel Marrakech is a welcome gear-shift after the sensory overload of the medina — polished, buzzy and the ideal place to shed our mum-and-dad alter egos. Drifting between pools, eating sushi in our swimsuits and briefly contemplating a Louis Vuitton purchase I absolutely did not need, it was surprisingly easy to settle into this alternate version of ourselves — if only for a couple of nights.

If Marrakech is a city of contrasts, its Nobu outpost sits squarely on the high-gloss, high-octane end. And every now and then, that’s exactly the mood you want.