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Home and Work

A Textile Designer’s Calming, Sunlit Life

Barkowski in the cactus garden of her house outside Marrakesh.Credit...Luis Díaz Díaz

AS A TEENAGER during the 1980s in a Belgian seaside town, Valerie Barkowski watched as her father went about his job organizing yachting regattas on the English Channel. A more stolid soul might have found the gentle waters lulling. But all Barkowski wanted to know was: How do I sail away? Even then, she gathered that a provincial life along the coast wasn’t for her.

Not much later, she left Belgium, quitting design school in Ghent in her early 20s to travel through Italy and India, followed by stints modeling in Europe, dealing art in Moscow and finally, settling (at least as much as someone so restless can) in Marrakesh in 1996.

Fascinated with the disappearing artisanal crafts she saw in Moroccan villages, she created a linen line, V. Barkowski, which employed nearly 500 embroiderers in North Africa at its height in the early aughts. She has since scaled back that operation, but her portfolio now includes Dar Kawa, an impeccably pared-down riad in the labyrinthine medina, and an eponymous store opened in 2016; it carries her linens along with a few locally made leather bags and accessories in the muted shades she favors. She’s also creative director of the Mumbai-based housewares brand No-Mad; her designs reinterpret traditional Indian textiles and ceramics in a modern palette.

Statuesque and no-nonsense — she combines the grace of Ingrid Bergman with the snap of Bea Arthur — Barkowski, now 52, still pinballs around the world, from Vietnam, where she helped a nonprofit group develop an operation for making quilts and papier-mache objects, back to Brussels. “I am not good at resting,” she says, which is an understatement: A tutor is about to arrive at the riad for her twice-weekly Japanese lesson. It will be her seventh language.

While it has become ordinary for Western designers to jet to the East for inspiration (and the less-expensive work of skilled craftsmen), Barkowski approaches her work differently: Having embedded herself deep in Southeast Asia and Northern Africa, she doesn’t merely infuse her designs with exotic elements. She begins with the techniques themselves, whether stitching or motifs or fabrics. “To my mind, this only works if you live in the place,” she says. “Otherwise it shows in what you make.” Her cotton bedsheets, for example, are trimmed with tiny pompoms secured with a sewing technique from northern Morocco that ensures they don’t fall off.

WHEN BARKOWSKI IS in Marrakesh, she spends most of her time at Dar Kawa, built in the early 1700s. She bought the riad — a wreck — in 1996, after first visiting the city five years earlier, when it was far less tourist-friendly. “I developed a crush on this place, which was so wild compared to where I had grown up,” she says.

To restore the 1,950-square-foot courtyard home, she hired the modernist Belgian architect Quentin Wilbaux, who has won acclaim for his reimaginings of Moroccan riads and his meticulous cataloging of the city’s houses. Together, they created a dramatic yet inviting whitewashed oasis that Barkowski outfitted sparely with sculptural furniture in black metal and cedar, paired with her own charcoal linens.

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The riad’s al fresco dining area.Credit...Luis Díaz Díaz

For much of the previous decade, she lived in this riad. The artists’ residency she ran, Sahart, meant the house was often full of painters, photographers and sculptors who stayed for 2-month-long stints in a nearby house and at her desert camp near the Algerian border; in exchange, they were asked only to leave behind a piece of work.

In 2008, she converted the riad into a four-bedroom hotel. Though it’s not rentable through the usual online booking sites, it has become particularly popular among like-minded Scandinavian, Swiss and Japanese travelers who want a minimal take on Marrakesh’s maximal charm. (“There’s a tribe who finds out about it through word of mouth,” she says.)

Barkowski and her husband now live in a modest, simply renovated home near the Palmeraie, a desert oasis about a 30-minute drive from the medina. Like Scottsdale, Ariz., the area is carved from a once-glorious landscape — thousands of date palms were planted during the 11th century — but has since become a showplace for fortresslike mansions and private golf clubs.

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Fold-up chairs and tasseled pillows at her eponymous boutique.Credit...Luis Díaz Díaz

But Barkowski’s house is “from an older time,” she says of the 1,900-square foot, ’30s-era French colonial bungalow. When the couple moved in, she brought some raw wood packing pallets to use as bed-frames, a stopgap until she bought real furniture. But she has instead kept them, adding flea-market finds, including tables made from old doors, and textiles in a subdued pale-earth palette, flecked with red accents.

What sold her on the place was the tree: a 50-foot Pistacia atlantica is the property’s dominant feature, planted about 300 years ago. With deep roots that ferret out water, such trees were once common in North Africa, but most have been lost to deforestation. From its darkly fissured boughs, Barkowski has hung simplified versions of typical Moroccan tin lanterns. Below them is a seating area and a table draped in No-Mad fabrics, where she serves guests dishes like aubergine salad with pomegranate seeds and yogurt.

Otherwise, the property’s main features are sunlight and space: a luxury in busy Marrakesh — or anywhere. “The city is a madness of color and shape, and my mind never stops with ideas,” Barkowski says. “When I come here, I want a void.” Her goal was to create a home so balanced that, with little more than a mattress on the floor — covered in good linens, of course — there would be a sense of arid beauty and timeless serenity. “In Europe it’s cold and you are surrounded by elaborate elegance,” she says. “Here, how much do you really need?”

A correction was made on 
Oct. 26, 2017

An earlier version of this article misstated the products made by the nonprofit group Barkowski helped operate in Vietnam. The group made quilts and and papier-mâché objects, not ceramics. The article also misspelled the name of the artist residency Barkowski ran. It is Sahart, not Sarhat.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 56 of T Magazine with the headline: Spare Rooms. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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