Rob Ashford is a stage director, and for him and his partner, Kevin Ryan, everything can become a set piece. For instance, the drawing room in their enchanting and enchanted Tangier house, the Villa Léon l’Africain, looks primed for someone to trill prettily on the piano – Sondheim, perhaps, or Loesser, or Lloyd Webber. Outside, under the veranda, lies a convivial space with roomy upholstered wicker furniture that can easily accommodate an army of guests.
The villa nestles in the heart of town. All around it, charming flower markets with cages crowded with lovebirds and canaries, and turn-of-the-century villas with large, unruly gardens, have gradually evanesced to be replaced by bland high-rises. But taking a modest little road off the main thoroughfare, one sees a high, dark-green double metal gate and tall yellow walls. Everything beyond is a thing of pure magic, a jungle of palms enveloping a perfect villa, built in 1912.
I had known the place when Richard Timewell lived there. In 1967, aged 54, he retired from his role as head of furniture at Sotheby’s and came to Tangier, bringing the contents of his Albany set with him. The dining room had mahogany Regency chairs and a plethora of Georgian mezzotints of dashing soldiers, and in the sitting room with its strawberry-fool walls, his prize possessions were protected from the fierce Moroccan sun by rosy chintz curtains.
After Timewell died the house was sold to the legendary Christopher Gibbs (WoI March 2000), and not long after it became the town-house residence of Pierre Bergé (WoI Dec 2012). He hired Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty, the brilliant pair from Studio KO (WoI April 2023), to transform it into a French villa, with a bedroom on the newly built second floor, impressive marbled en suite bathrooms and Moorish arches in the downstairs rooms. A lift was built to connect all the floors. Outside, Madison Cox created something dense and wondrous that resembles Mrs Venable’s New Orleans garden in Suddenly Last Summer. Incidentally, this was the first play that Rob staged for a one-night-only charity production in this very garden in Tangier (during Bergé’s ownership), starring Ruth Wilson, Tom Bateman and Linda Lavin. These shows have since become highlights of the Tangier year, although now Rob sets them in Veere Grenney’s extraordinary house and gardens overlooking the straits (WoI March 2019).
Rob and Kevin had been renting the dramatic cliffside Villa Mabrouka for several years when Pierre Bergé wanted to make it his home again. So they did a swap, moving into town to the Villa Léon l’Africain. They called on their friends Gene Meyer and Frank de Biasi (WoI Oct 2024) to help them transform it. ‘Kevin and Rob just love to shop,’ declares Frank. ‘We were just able to provide a new background for the house, one that was more them. They love pattern. They love colours – and they’re pretty fearless in their choices. They wanted to be comfortable as well. They do a lot of entertaining.’
For the dining room, they commissioned a large green-painted mirror from Now on the Ocean, based in Rohuna (WoI Dec 2019), which was founded by Umberto Pasti, and is run by the maker Najim Imran. Najim also produced the evocative ‘Georgian rustic’ chairs and tables under the veranda, looked over by a pressed gunnera leaf by the artist Stuart Thornton, once butler to Marella Agnelli. (Thornton also made a butterfly mirror upstairs, which reflects a steel Belle Epoque bed that once belonged to Yves Saint Laurent.) The elegant Jansen table was a welcome gift from Madison Cox. ‘I had an antique ballroom chair that I got in Savannah but it was so rickety,’ says Rob, who sent a photograph of it to Meriam Bikkour at Rotin Ameublement, a local wicker emporium, to make a series, and now these are upholstered in a plethora of strong colours.
Rob remembers the sitting room as ‘white, white, white. Everything was white marble, white banquettes...’ Meyer and De Biasi reupholstered the latter in bright apple green, and hung a 1940s theatrical chandelier found at Gordon Watson’s, purveyor of irresistible Tangerine goodies. They dotted about helpful little brass-and-wicker tables made by themselves, adding the odd ballroom chair, and spread straw carpets from Bleu de Fes. The grand piano takes centre stage here (over the years, Rob has produced A Little Night Music, Follies and Tru in Tangier).
Through a Moorish archway lies the second part of the sitting room, painted in a smörgåsbord of delicious colours – pink, with cornicing in eau de nil, with darker green-and-pink edging. The fireplace is surrounded by a wall of kingfisher tiles and set off with an Edwardian fender, its top made from embroidered leather saddles by the upholsterer Redouan Bakkali.
From welcoming wicker armchairs, upholstered in a Carolina Irving linen, one can admire a wondrous painting by James McBey – who lived in Tangier in the 1930s and 40s – of a Moroccan lady (looking away from the painter for decorum’s sake), and a portrait of a white-turbaned young man that is one of Lawrence Mynott’s first (and finest) works painted here.
Bergé had the garden room papered in an irresistible 1880s panorama of exotic flora by Zuber, and Rob and Kevin found 19th-century metal beds from Jerry ‘the Bed’ Butler, adding elaborately worked wicker tables and chairs, all twists and curlicues, painted green or cinnabar, from their decorator pals. With its palm-frond Madeleine Castaing carpet, its armchair upholstered in hydrangea print by Marian McEvoy, pale-green taffeta curtains and exquisite early 19th-century chandelier, this is now a bedroom reserved for the leading actresses who have come to per-
form in Rob’s Tangier productions.
On the top-floor landing, a wonderful Moroccan chest from Majid’s shop in the medina ushers one to the principal bedroom. Within lies a Bleu de Fes carpet of rust and raspberry, a pair of silk-velvet armchairs from Pierre Bergé and a study of Tangier by Jean-Pierre Favre, found at the dealer Boubker Temli. Crowning it all is Jerry’s ceremonial four-poster bed.
Rob and Kevin found an archive of extraordinary pictures of the house as Timewell had it, decorated by Colefax & Fowler’s Michael Raymond, his then partner. They had been in a separate building that served as Bergé’s study and which is now used by Rob and Kevin as a dramatic setting for large meals; the former has since moved them into his bedroom.
‘We’re thrilled to be here,’ he says. ‘We loved Pierre and he was so kind to us. So this is our homage to his love’.
The shop of Frank de Biasi and Gene Meyer in Tangier, Habibi Burton, can be found at L'Immeuble No. 11, No. L2. Rue Khalid Ibn Oualid, 90000, Tanger, Maroc. For more information, contact info@habibiburton.com
A version of this article appears in the May 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
