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and includes Meyer’s Gene’s Chapbook I and II, collections of his
quirky portraits, including many of fellow Tangerine aesthetes.)
Meyer couldn’t join de Biasi at the time, as he was preparing
one of his menswear collections, but the two visited together
the following summer, and Meyer fell in love, too, with “the
people, the friends, the climate, the food, the history, the exoti-
cism that other places didn’t have.” The couple also responded
to the leisurely pace and round of formal entertaining among
the expatriate community and Moroccan friends that evoked
their shared Southern upbringings (de Biasi is from Richmond
and Meyer from Louisville, Kentucky).
Soon enough, they were looking for a place of their own
and were drawn to the village atmosphere of the medina in
the heart of the city, engirdled by ancient fortifications and
crowned by the palace of the Casbah. Many of the traditional
houses here, however, have a claustrophobic lack of light, so
when the couple found a ruinous place on a little open square,
with exposures on three sides, they knew they could make it
their own. Their renovation ultimately took four years as they
rebuilt paper-thin walls, replaced a life-threateningly vertigi-
nous staircase with one inspired by the Old Fort Bay clubhouse
in the Bahamas, and installed a light-well based on one de Biasi
had seen in India and such mod cons as under-floor heating.
The couple would visit the site several times a year. “Being
in Tangier is like one continual house tour,” Meyer adds, “and
everybody celebrates their individuality.” Meyer found himself
tongue-tied at cocktail parties held by the legendary local
doyenne Anna Mahmoudi, so hard was he trying to focus on
memorizing her idiosyncratic tonal combinations: “Robin’s-egg
blue, pale sage green, tomato-soupy-coral, and a lot of black
and dark green,” he rhapsodizes. “The way that the colors hit
each other and they’re put together—I was just losing my mind!”
EVENTUALLY, SUCH INVENTIVE inspirations as the incised plaster-
work on Yves Saint Laurent’s bedroom ceiling, the squinches
of the distinguished antiquaire Christopher Gibbs’s domed
drawing room, the fireplace mantel of the botanist and writer
Umberto Pasti, and the contrast-bordered cement tiled floors
chez Mickey Raymond, who once worked for Colefax &
Fowler Assoc., all found their way into the home where the
couple pooled their respective skill sets. “For Gene, color
comes first,” de Biasi explains. “For me, layout and function
and livability come first.” De Biasi transformed the light-filled
top floor into a summer drawing room, with a tucked-away
kitchen, while the ground floor became a cozy winter sitting
room, with the master and guest bedrooms in between.
LEFT A COWTAN
& TOUT CHINTZ
COVERS THE LIVING
ROOM SOFA AND
TWO SLIPPER CHAIRS.
1940s MIRROR;
MOROCCAN TABLES;
MAURETANIAN CANE-
AND-LEATHER RUG.
“Being in Tangier
is like one
continual house
tour,” says
Meyer, “and
everybody
celebrates their
individuality.”
