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PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA
Dar Khalifa - or The Caliph’s House - looks out of place in Casablanca now. Wedged between modern high rises, on the western fringes of the city, the property sits like a verdant oasis in a desert of functional modernity. But it wasn’t always like that. Writer and photographer Sam Parkes explores an extraordinary house.
BY SAM PARKES | ROOMS & GARDENS | 5 JUNE 2025
When Tahir Shah first bought this boarded-up, sprawling white mansion in Casablanca over 20 years ago, it sat slap-bang in the middle of a bidonville - a Moroccan shanty town. In Islam, Caliph means a notable leader of a religious community, but in north Africa it also means a commander or government official.
A grand house with a grand title - once owned by someone of great prominence - it’s thought Dar Khalifa was the landmark that gave Casablanca (‘white house’) its name. Under the glare of a fierce north African sun, a kilometre from the Atlantic, it must have shone like a beacon to approaching Spanish ships.
Shah is from a family of well traveled Anglo-Afghan writers. His father, Idries Shah, a Sufi scholar, considered Robert Graves and Dorris Lessing as close friends. When he was a child, a guest turned up to the family home in Kent: the infamously reclusive American novelist, JD Salinger. As a writer himself, living in a tiny London apartment, Shah dreamed of relocating his young family to Morocco.
After viewing various properties in Marrakech, Fez and Tangier, he found Dar Khalifa in Casablanca and recounted the story in his bestselling book, The Caliph's House.
A potholed road passes newly built apartments and a small, isolated mosque constructed of breeze blocks- all that remains of the bidonville. Nothing, upon arrival, suggests of a unique house with a unique history. A left hand turn down a single gravel track runs beside a long white wall where a billowing pink Bougainvillea spills over like champagne.
The moment one steps foot on the property, as though by some sleight of hand, the modern world of expediency and unprepossessing utility slowly sheds its skin. Zigzagging green tiles and the glint of four gold Buddhist prayer wheels from Lhasa catch the eye before entering the house through an enormous and intricately carved Berber door, like the entrance of an ark.
Offering much needed relief from the heat and glare of the Moroccan sun, the house has the cool, dark spaciousness of a sacred building. A colourful portrait of Shah’s distant relative, Jan-Fishan Khan - meaning ‘he who scatters souls in battle’ - hangs in the entrance, opposite a wall of black and white photographs of Indian Maharajahs.
A living room of generous dimensions opens on all sides to arched doorways, between which light curtains, laced to a nape with red bows, billow gently from a breeze that flows through the house like a benevolent and congenial spirit; in a small riad connecting the living room to the dining room and kitchen, a gnarled tree trunk like a reaching hand mushrooms over an upstairs balcony.
In Morocco, the outside is the inside and the inside is the outside. On hot summer days it is a blessing; during the winter months an open fireplace offers consolation.
Thick walls are covered in a Venetian plastering technique known as tadelek- a mixture of marble dust, lime and egg yolks, polished to a sheen with egg whites. Palatial, cool and calm, with warm tones- the house seems imbued with the Islamic notion of hospitality as a sacred duty.
There is barely a corner of the house that does not speak of fabulous, far flung lands, exotic journeys and quixotic characters. Objet d’art, collected from around the world over generations, line shelves and tables and cabinets: a Kashkul begging bowl made from half a coco de mer from the Seychelles; red-lacquered Burmese betel boxes; steel Damascened Ibex; vintage chairs from Aleppo; bird-headed daggers from Jaipur; old rifles and a handmade diving helmet from Pakistan. Antique iron astrolabes from the near east hang like floating planets.
At the end of a long room shaped like an elongated shadow, behind a wall of books that appears to be a dead end, a secret door swivels open from within the bookcase to reveal Shah’s office, and through an alcratrive opening shaped like the turret of a sultan’s palace, the oldest part of the house can be glimpsed: the library and riad.
A fragment of the library of Alexandria - with a perfume of cedarwood - it is an enviable space; shelf after shelf filled with books on the occult, magic and sorcery; histories of religions and freemasonry and mysticism; whole columns dedicated to India, Persia, Latin America, central Asia and north Africa.
A pair of steel Yazidi peacocks from Iraq buttress old editions of the Arabian Nights; tomes of Hafiz and Rumi and Ibn Arabi; books on Islamic art and African masks, collecting and antiques, Moroccan interiors and Persian carpets; and volumes on explorers like Ibn Battuta, Freya Stark, Wilfred Thesiger, Charles Doughty and Sir Richard Francis Burton. In the corner of the library, beside a 19th-century Spanish cavalry uniform, one of the finest narwhal tusks in private collection corkscrews halfway to the ceiling like an elongated shell.
These days people misuse the term 'riad' to mean boutique hotel or guest house, but originally it meant garden, which in Islam is regarded as an expression of paradise. With his veneration for skilled craftsmanship and deep reverence for the past, Shah commissioned an intricate mosaic fountain of 5000 individual pieces to be handmade by a muallim (master craftsman), around which a Sufi Zawiya (school for religious education) once existed. Like the Arabian Nights, there are stories within stories.
It’s hard not to feel a pang of sadness and foreboding about a home of such rich history, surrounded by encroaching developments. Whenever I leave The Caliph’s House I feel I’m being wrenched prematurely from a world I’m not yet ready to relinquish - blinking like a newborn into the harsh glare of modern life, but that bit wiser and more worldly. For now, at least, it stands like a symbol of something precious and worth preserving.
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