How a Grandmother’s Life Story Inspired a Luxe New Resort in Morocco

In the early 20th century, a poor, beautiful brother and sister hatched a plan to escape the confines of their hometown, Bari, the capital of Italy’s Puglia region. The brother had an athletic streak, and his headstrong, creative sister knew she was destined for more than a life as just another mamma in a run-down shack. The brother, Enzo Fiermonte, became a champion boxer. When he moved to America, he adopted the occasional sobriquet William Bird—the better to sidestep the prejudice against his Italian origins. This led him to Hollywood, where he starred in countless movies and married one of the richest women of the day—the Titanic widow and survivor Madeleine Astor—making him even more famous. The sister, Antonia, ended up in Paris, where she bewitched the surrealist-dominated cultural scene. Though a talented painter herself, she became better known as a model and muse, especially for two best friends, artists René Letourneur and Jacques Zwobada. 

Both men fell in love with her; she married each of them in turn, and they lived in a ménage à trois in adjoining homes just south of Paris. But Antonia died young, at 42, too early to have left the impression she yearned to make. 

Nearly a century later, another pair of siblings—Antonia’s wealthy and well-connected grandchildren—are working tirelessly to give her that lasting legacy. The brother, Fouad Filali, is the former CEO of Morocco’s largest conglomerate, ONA, which he ran for 13 years until 1999. King Mohammed VI is his former brother-in-law. (Fouad was married to the monarch’s older sister, Princess Lalla Meryem, for 15 years.) Fouad’s sister—Yasmina Antonia Filali, who’s named for their grandmother—is a passionate philanthropist who has spent most of her adult life running her own nonprofit, the Fondation Orient-Occident, which assists low-income women and refugees on both sides of the Mediterranean. They idolize their grandmother, and even though she died before they were born, they believe she deserves to be celebrated. 

“Everybody looked at me when I was young, and said, ‘You look like her, and you have the same character,’ ” Yasmina says. “I feel totally connected to her.” 

The link is so strong that the pair started a hotel collection, named La Fiermontina in their grandmother’s honor, as a living tribute to her. They granted Robb Report exclusive access to the newest location in their portfolio, in Larache, Morocco. The hotel, La Fiermontina Ocean, joined outposts in Paris and Lecce, Italy—a chic apartment available to rent on the Place Vendôme and three separate properties not far from the Adriatic Sea, respectively—when it opened in 2023. The idea behind the grouping: “Let’s re-create her story with a little collection of hotels, following her journey around the world,” says Yasmina. 

But they want the company to act as more than just an expensive memorial. The siblings aim to help poor women—women like their grandmother—to improve their lives. “We think about hospitality and philanthropy together,” Yasmina continues. “It’s how we breathe.” 

La Fiermontina Ocean is the most extensive expression of that objective. It includes a complex of 14 luxury villas on Morocco’s wild Atlantic coast, 11 of which have ocean views and private pools. All of them are cannily angled to minimize the overlook from the other lodgings and are filled with minimalist, midcentury-inspired furniture. Some of the embroidered linens on the beds and in the bathrooms were produced by a nonprofit cooperative that’s part of Yasmina’s foundation. The landscape is punctuated by acres of mature olive groves—mostly trees brought in from Marrakech. There’s even a stand-alone beach club tucked under the dunes and accessible by a thrilling, hold-the-handrails journey down from the hotel. 

But this isn’t some bubble of luxury, detached from its surroundings. The rest of the resort is located in the village of Dchier, next door to those villas; the siblings built the resort’s treatment rooms and hammam here intentionally, to encourage their predominantly foreign guests to engage with local people. 

“I want to revive life here,” Fouad says from the driver’s seat of his Jeep, looking around at the town’s dusty road. It’s one of Morocco’s poorest areas. The previous king, Hassan II, focused attention (and investment) farther south, allowing both the commercial hub of Casablanca and the tourist magnet of Marrakech to boom. In contrast, when Fouad started buying land here 21 years ago, several villages in the area lacked plumbing. “How could I have a house here with a swimming pool when they don’t have running water?” he recalls thinking as he watched women carrying pails into their homes. 

Fouad has erected other structures in Dchier and elsewhere nearby, doubling the number of classrooms here and in the three surrounding villages. For the hotel, there are simple rental cottages, aimed at a more mass-market clientele than the oceanfront villas, and a café. Rows of herbs in stepped gardens—used for tea service at the hammam, among other things—are tended by a team of workers. He has just reconstructed a small building in the center of town and will lease it to a local to run a bodega-like épicerie soon, an alternative to the miles-long walks to the market most have to make now. 

The pair spent two years training residents to work at the hotel, to ensure that they benefitted directly from increasing tourism. That’s also the idea behind the breakfast-at-home program, which costs 450 dirham (about $45) per person: All of the money goes straight to the neighborhood woman who invites you into her house for your first meal of the day, with a member of hotel staff joining as a translator—the better to prompt conversation. 

The squat breakfast table of my host, Rahma, is piled high with food: crumbly, homemade pastries dusted with sugar; a fragrant dish of locally grown olives; slabs of swirled chocolate cake; and platters of various flatbreads, all still warm from the oven. There’s a bowl of amlou, made from almonds and argan oil, runny and not dissimilar to peanut butter and especially delicious slathered over the bread. 

The centerpiece is a tureen of the thick bean soup bissara, a regional breakfast staple that’s drizzled with local olive oil. The entire meal is served in Rahma’s courtyard as chickens peck nearby and a few cats sidle past, casually eyeing the spread. A quartet of children sit to one side, giggling and glancing furtively at the food while their mother continues to cook, bobbing over to the table to pour more thimbles of fresh-mint tea. “When they open their house as your hostess, it gives them dignity, it makes people more equal,” Yasmina says. 

Like their grandmother, the village girl from Italy’s dirt-poor south who morphed into a sophisticated Parisian muse, the siblings’ identities are hard to pin down. Their mother, Anne, now in her 90s and living in Paris, is their grandmother’s only surviving child. Anne married Abdellatif Filali, a Moroccan student who went to France to escape the unrest in his home country in the early 1950s. At first, they didn’t even speak the same language, “but they understood each other without talking to each other,” Fouad says with a shy smile. Filali eventually became a diplomat and, in 1994, he was appointed prime minister of an independent Morocco. 

As a result of their Italian-French-Moroccan heritage, Fouad and his sister slip between cultures, sliding among names and languages. Yasmina toggles between her first and middle names depending on where she is in the world. Fouad is officially Fouad Giacomo Filali, or Jacques in France—he has even been referred to in the press (incorrectly) as Giacomo Fiermonte. It’s telling how much he stresses that he prefers to be known as Fouad, a traditional Middle Eastern name, while in Morocco. Wherever they are, they want to belong.

It makes sense, then, that Fouad will slip into Arabic to talk with the hotel’s staff, or speak Italian to the jolly, bearded 20-something chef, Antonio Gianfreda, who has just arrived from Italy. In fact, the menu at La Fiermontina Ocean nods to that cultural commingling: For one meal, a fish tagine spiked with fat, locally grown green olives; for another, a crispy pizza fresh from a wood-fired oven, covered in melting anchovies. 

“I want to revive life here,” Fouad says. “How could I have a house here with a swimming pool when they don’t have running water?”

The property was originally intended as a private escape. The siblings fell in love with the area after staying with a friend, Patrick Guérrand-Hermès, the polo-playing scion of the French luxury maison, who has an estate just up the coast. They were so taken that they began buying land nearby. At first they would come, perhaps for a day, to sit and picnic in the dunes with friends. 

“It was our refuge—we were hiding from everyone,” says Yasmina. It’s easy to do here. Even on a warm spring day the beaches are empty: In some spots, the only evidence of human life is the occasional dilapidated shack along the water. (“Those are for smugglers,” one local says, only half-joking.) 

As with the apartment in Paris and the resort in Larache, the siblings’ Italian hotel also began life as a personal project. They were smitten with Lecce, where the Hermès family also keeps a villa, which is about two hours south of their grandmother’s hometown of Bari. 

Inspired, the Filalis began snapping up property. Fouad recalls securing a swath of farmland near Lecce first. “I bought it because of the olive trees, but I never built a house there,” he says. “I just had a small chair I’d leave there, and once in a while I’d go down and sit and look at the olive trees.” He ended up buying a building near the city walls next. “In the beginning it was for my house. But life, you know, happens,” he says with a shrug. 

After working on the property for two years, Fouad’s contractors discovered subterranean rooms that, in his view, made it too large to be a private home. So he and Yasmina asked their friend Thierry Teyssier, the actor-turned-hotelier best known for founding the regenerative-hospitality company 700,000 Heures, for advice. Yasmina could see the potential in using tourism to help bring investment to the region, which has grown since their grandmother’s childhood yet still remains a poorer corner of the Italian peninsula. 

As she would later do in Morocco, Yasmina launched a program offering work to women and refugees in need while training locals in the art of high-touch service. The family now operates La Fiermontina Palazzo Bossi Corso, an old baroque mansion with a rooftop pool and 10 suites, plus the 19-bedroom La Fiermontina Luxury Home. 

They also recently reopened the Fiermonte Museum, whose exhibitions focus on their grand-mother and her two artistic husbands, Letourner and Zwobada. You can stay here, too. The renovation added four rooms to the property, with a lantern in each. (Guests are encouraged to explore the galleries, alone, at night.) Yasmina and Fouad’s mother, Anne, traveled to Puglia especially for the opening. “She was quite silent and surprised, in a way, that two children, at our age, dedicated our lives to our grandmother,” Yasmina recalls. 

She plans to stay in Italy for a while, to stabilize the new museum while Fouad focuses on their Morocco project. But they’re not finished. The missing piece is a tribute to their grandmother’s globe-trotting brother, Enzo, who stayed in America after his divorce from Madeleine Astor and starred in films from the late 1930s through the ’70s. “Maybe we can make a project in New York and Los Angeles,” Yasmina says. “And that will be all for my great-uncle.” 

Meanwhile in the Med

The closest big city to La Fiermontina Ocean is Tangier, which has always stood apart from Morocco’s urban centers. It’s located far in the north, as connected to Europe as it is to Africa. For several decades in the 20th century, it was an international zone, administered by a cluster of countries including Italy and Spain, deeding it an edgy, artsy vibe that lingers today. 

There’s plenty of newness that makes it worth a trip, according to Plan It Morocco, a local agency specializing in luxury travel. “It’s going back to what it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was a very hip place to be,” says the firm’s Chloe Zarb, a Scottish expat who lives and works here. “It’s becoming more sassy, there’s so much more excitement and development. [King Mohammed VI] wants to bring the country forward.” 

Zarb regularly brings guests to Villa Mabrouka, the Robb Report Best of the Best winner opened by fashion designer Jasper Conran in a villa once owned by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Make sure to book a dinner in the romantic, Madison Cox–inspired gazebo, where up to eight people can take a private supper. Waldorf Astoria has announced plans for a property here, and architect Jean-Louis Deniot bought one of the modernist buildings near the waterfront, with plans to convert it into another boutique hotel. 

But so much of life in Tangier happens in its vast, private mansions. One standout is Dar Sinclair, the longtime family home of model and socialite Jacquetta Wheeler, who spent much of her childhood here. Plan It Morocco can help you rent the mansion to enjoy its superb views over the water, plus the gardens that cascade down the hill and lead to a huge swimming pool. Book a chef to cook dinner amid the greenery. 

While Tangier doesn’t have the surfeit of stores that makes Marrakech so appealing, it is known for small textile and weaving workshops, and for good reason. “There’s baraka, or a blessing, in working with your hands,” says Hadia Temli, a gallerist who grew up here. “Craftsmanship is valued for that reason.” Don’t miss the three-story concept store Las Chicas on the road outside the casbah walls, offering an array of clothing, jewelry, and housewares. Fashion designer Gene Meyer and his partner, interior designer Frank de Biasi, were set to launch their own store, Habibi Burton, at the end of July, selling vintage housewares as well as contemporary home goods and clothes made by locals. Or visit Gordon Watson, a British antiques dealer who has split time between London and Tangier for over 30 years and who now lives here full-time. “There’s energy in the air here, something in the atmosphere, which is so charged. There are so many different people coming now,” he says. His home doubles as his gallery, and he’ll receive you in his junglelike garden.