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says AD100 talent Frank de Biasi of the evocative Moroccan
port city that he and his partner, the multifaceted designer
Gene Meyer, have made their home. “There’s a central energy
here,” he explains, “where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean,
where Europe meets Africa. It’s a psychic point like no
other place.”
De Biasi first discovered the city on a spring break in
1984: He had taken a student rail pass from Paris and just kept
traveling south into the great unknown. His first impressions,
however, were not promising. “It was a very dirty, very down-
and-out port town,” he recalls, “rough, but exciting and exotic”;
he and his traveling companions soon moved on.
It wasn’t until 2001, when he was working for Peter Marino
(sourcing rare and exquisite fabrics from Laos to Maheshwar),
that he rediscovered the place when his assistant Daria
Prentice invited him to visit and stay at the pretty villa of her
mother, Elena Prentice, a pillar of the city’s cultural life.
(Elena Prentice’s publishing house, Khbar Bladna, is devoted
to writers and artists who have lived or worked in Morocco,“Tangier is the
crossroads of somany civilizations,”