Header: Juan Carlos Vega
Le Square is a new hotel in the Gauthier district of Casablanca, bringing European class to the famous Moroccan city through its 60 rooms, spa, meeting rooms, ground-floor coffee lounge and rooftop restaurant. Casablanca’s European city was planned in 1913 by French architect Henri Prost, and Gauthier is one of its most important districts, known for its Art Deco blocks and its café terraces.
The interiors are by Michelangeli Design, the studio Jerome Michelangeli founded in 2007, and the building was designed by the Casablanca architect Salma Dioury. It opened in October of 2025 as the first hotel of ONOMO Collection, having later won the “Hotel Design” category at the SIT Awards 2026.
Concrete, stone and salvaged marble
The building is located on one of the last empty plots in Gauthier, a narrow corner site on Rue Moussa Ben Noussair. Dioury designed it as tall and thin, made of stone in sand tones, with large balconies and deep windows framed in wrought iron.
The lobby and the other shared rooms are dressed in exposed concrete and a cream-toned plaster, with offcuts of recovered marble creating patterns on the floor. Wide curtains hang in front of double-height arches, helping soften them, and Michelangeli kept the corridors deliberately dim so light washes on the walls.
The Camaleonda sofas in the shared rooms were designed by Mario Bellini for B&B Italia in 1970 and are made of 90 by 90 cm cushions united by tie-rods and rings. The seats, backs and arms can be unhooked and put back together in various shapes. The Pacha chairs in the same rooms were designed by Pierre Paulin in 1975 and reissued by Gubi.
The corridor walls are sculpted with bas-reliefs inspired by the moucharabieh, the carved wooden lattice fitted over an upper-floor window in older Arab houses, which lets the people inside watch the street without being seen and lets cool air through. The same geometric forms can be seen in other areas of the interior, such as in ceramic and in gresite, the small squares of coloured glass used for mosaic.
The rooms
The rooms go from 23 m² for a standard room to 62 m² for the largest suites, with the ones facing the Hassan II Mosque getting their own private balconies. The joinery was made with marquetry, each small piece of wood cut and fitted by hand, then finished with thin fillets of bronze along the edges.
Bathrooms are lined in tadelakt, a lime plaster laid on in many thin coats with a trowel and then polished with a stone. Olive oil soap is rubbed in afterwards, which ends up creating calcium stearate in reaction with the lime, which is what makes the surface resist water and scratching. The basins are carved from marble, and in the premium rooms artists painted images drawn from old Casablanca postcards straight onto the ceiling above the bed.
The eighth floor
The restaurant and the 360-degree bar are located on the top floor, with terraces looking out over the port, the towers of the Twin Center and the Hassan II Mosque – ONOMO counts it as one of the few vantage points in Casablanca that overlooks both the towers and the mosque.
The rooftop first opened as a Levantine restaurant called Sain Levant and is now presented as HÉDY, serving French cuisine. On the ground floor, guests can enjoy the Square Club and the Square Spa, which works with Botanika Marrakech, a Moroccan vegan brand, to offer treatments that use argan oil and other local ingredients.
“Entering the building, stepping into the lobby, searching for that forgotten memory, that feeling of déjà vu mixed with curiosity about a space that plays on the alternation of raw and sophisticated surfaces. An eclectic cocoon where time seems to stand still. Somewhere between the 50s and today.”
Michelangeli Design
Project information
Interior Design Company: Michelangeli Design
Lead Designer: Jerome Michelangeli
Other Designers: Lola Bellosillo Gomez, project leader
Architecture Company: Salma Dioury Architecte
Other Credits: FF&E and Craftworks, Eximcom
Photography: Juan Carlos Vega
Location: Casablanca, Morocco
Date: 2025
