Musee Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech

The museum covers 4,000 square metres, was designed by the Paris practice Studio KO and was built by the Moroccan subsidiary of Bouygues. From outside it reads as an assemblage of cubes and curves in an earth colour, dressed in a lace of brick that the architects intended to evoke the weave of fabric: a plain surface at a distance, a textile at ten metres. The materials are terracotta, concrete and terrazzo, the earth bricks were made from Moroccan earth and produced locally, and the terrazzo at the entrance and across the ground floor is an aggregate of stone and Moroccan marbles.

Inside, the palette flips to a smooth cream, so the transition from the street is the building's one theatrical move.

The award, and only that award

It was recognised quickly. In January 2018, three months after opening, it took the best new public building award at the Design Awards of the British magazine Wallpaper. That is the only architectural prize we found attached to it, and it is worth stating plainly rather than gesturing at a shelf of them.

Practically, the facade is the thing to plan around. It faces the street, it is at its best in low sun in the late afternoon, and photographing it costs nothing at all. If your budget for the day is already committed to the garden, the honest advice is to walk the two minutes up the street, look at the brickwork, and put the 140 dirhams somewhere else.

If the couture is what you came for, the building is a bonus you would have paid for separately anywhere else.

The permanent exhibition hall is the reason for the ticket: a dim, theatrically lit room of Saint Laurent's work, drawn from personal collections that run to more than 7,000 garments and around 30,000 accessories, alongside photographs, videos and sketches. What hangs is a rotating selection rather than the whole archive, which is why two visits a year apart do not show the same clothes. Labels are sparse by design; the room is staged as a spectacle.

Majorelle room, temporary hall, auditorium, library

A hall given to Jacques Majorelle connects the museum to the garden up the street and to the painter whose blue everyone has already photographed. The temporary exhibition hall carries the changing shows, and it is the part most likely to be shut: it closed for six weeks between exhibitions in the summer of 2025 with the notice still on the booking page. The auditorium seats 130 and carries the talks and screenings programme. The research library holds more than 5,000 volumes, including Andalusi works dating back to the twelfth century as well as books on botany, Amazigh art and Saint Laurent's own work, and it is a working library rather than a display case.

There is also a bookshop and a cafe-restaurant with a patio. Neither publishes prices anywhere we could find, so no figure for a coffee appears on this page. If you want the shop without the museum, ask at the entrance rather than assuming: the museum's own site carries a shop section and no statement about whether it can be entered without a ticket, which is a small gap worth naming rather than guessing at.

The variable is the temporary hall. With a show up, the visit is close to 90 minutes and the auditorium programme can add more; between shows, the permanent hall and the Majorelle room are an unhurried hour. There is no re-entry on a ticket once you leave, so the museum is a block of time rather than something to drop in and out of, and the 10:00 opening means it cannot be your first stop of the day.

Our pick is the three-site code, and the reason is arithmetic rather than enthusiasm: the two-site pairing costs exactly what the two tickets cost separately, so the twenty dirhams that buys the third site is the only genuine saving on the street. If a Wednesday is your only free morning, take the garden and the Berber collection and spend the museum hour on the facade and a coffee in Gueliz. The combined entry card is the same three sites sold as a two-hour visit if you would rather not work the checkbox grid.

The museum homepage and the foundation's ticket office both give the same figures: every day of the week except Wednesday, 10:00 to 18:30, last entry 18:00. The museum's own Useful Information page gives 10:00 to 18:00, last entry 17:30. That is a half-hour discrepancy inside one website, and we read all three pages on the same day in Q3 2026.

Plan against the earlier close. The ticket office is the operative source, because it is what sells the timed slot and refuses a booking outside it, but arriving at 17:45 on the strength of the later figure is the kind of small bet that costs a whole visit, and the difference costs you nothing if you simply come earlier.

Wednesday, all year

The Wednesday is the fact worth carrying off this page. The museum closes every Wednesday, all year. The garden two minutes south does not close at all, and the Berber collection inside its walls keeps the same seven-day week, so a Wednesday visit to this street works perfectly well as long as nobody in the party is here for the couture.

The private garden of the Villa Oasis also closes on Wednesdays, which makes Wednesday the day when the street sells exactly two of its four ticketed things.

For quiet, the useful window is the back half of the afternoon. The museum opens two hours after the garden, so the 10:00 slot is taken largely by people walking up from a garden ticket they bought for 08:00 or 09:00; from about 16:30 that flow has stopped and the halls thin out. That is our reading rather than a published count.

No Moroccan authority publishes hourly visitor figures for any site in the city, and the only volume figure attached to this street at all is the garden's, reported at more than 700,000 visitors a year.

The Fondation Jardin Majorelle publishes a statement for the garden, in those words: the garden is wheelchair accessible. It says the same of the Cafe Majorelle, of the Boutique and of the Berber collection, and its French wording grants free admission to visitors with reduced mobility on presentation of a carte d'invalidite en cours de validite, a formal and current disability card. Note that the French is stricter than the English translation on the same site, which asks only for a card attesting to a disability.

If you are counting on the free admission, carry the formal document.

The same foundation, the opposite practice

The Musee Yves Saint Laurent, run by the same foundation, on the same street, publishes none of it. A crawl of its full 152-page sitemap returned zero hits for wheelchair, mobilite reduite, handicap, disabilit or accessibilit. There is no accessibility page, no line on the practical information page, and no wording either way.

That is not evidence the building is inaccessible: it is a new, single-level, purpose-built museum, and the plain likelihood is that it is more accessible than the garden. It is evidence that nobody has written the sentence down, which means a visitor who needs certainty has to telephone.

For context, the silence is the norm here rather than the exception. The Ben Youssef Madrasa's own FAQ asks the wheelchair question in French and leaves the answer panel empty. The Fondation Nationale des Musees has no network-wide policy, no disability card and no concession.

Morocco has had an accessibility law since 2003, loi 10-03, with implementing decrees in 2011, 2017 and 2019, and no Marrakech venue cites it. Two exceptions are worth knowing if the question decides your day: this foundation's garden, and Le Jardin Secret, which publishes the fullest statement of any venue in the city and gives free and priority access to visitors in wheelchairs and to blind visitors with their companions.

- The pairing with the garden saves nothing. The two-site code is 310 MAD and the two single tickets are 170 plus 140, which is also 310. Only the three-site code at 330 MAD is a discount, and it is 120 MAD off the 450 MAD the three cost bought singly [tickets.jardinmajorelle.com tariff endpoint, queried in Q3 2026]. - The museum's own site contradicts itself on the closing time. Homepage and ticket office say 18:30 with last entry at 18:00; the Useful Information page says 18:00 with last entry at 17:30 [museeyslmarrakech.com homepage and useful-information page, read in Q3 2026]. - The street was named after the designer before the museum was built. Studio KO's building went up on a road that already carried the name, next to the garden he and Berge had bought in 1980 [English Wikipedia, Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakesh, citing Le Monde]. - The museum was paid for by selling Moroccan art in Marrakech. Pierre Berge auctioned his collection of Moroccan works in the city in September 2015, and that sale notably financed the building [English Wikipedia, citing Telquel.ma]. - The tariff endpoint sells a Berber-plus-fashion-museum combination the booking form never shows you. It is priced at 310 MAD, which is 30 MAD more than the two museums bought separately, and it does not appear as a checkbox in the flow, so nobody is likely ever to buy it [tickets.jardinmajorelle.com tariff endpoint, queried in Q3 2026].

The sequence that works is the garden at 08:00, the Berber collection when it opens at 08:30, coffee, then this museum from 10:00, which puts you back on the street at about 11:30 with the whole medina still ahead. Reverse it and you spend the coolest hour of the day waiting for a door. On a Wednesday, drop the museum entirely and give the time to Le Jardin Secret or the souks instead; on any other day, the three-site code and a taxi back to the walls is a clean half day.

The rest of the ticket layer, including which four separate authorities set the prices in this city, is on the tickets index.