The great door opens to an orchard of apricot, lemon and olive trees. It looks like a palace, "riad" really doesn't do it justice and one walks through to an entrance straight from the baroque glories of Rome with an entrance lined with pillars and the statue of a goddess. Brilliantly conceived the pillars are actually cut short so that the person entering thinks that the statue is larger than it actually is. The courtyard and the palms are enchanting. Climbing the stairs and passing the swimming pool in the shape of a Mirhab or Moroccan door with a magnificent mosaic on the pool floor of the secret garden by Vanessa Vreeland. The glass door opens and Ambassador Freck and Vanessa Vreeland are there to greet me.

Freck Vreeland had a long and remarkable career in the diplomatic service of the United States starting as an operations officer in the CIA from 1951 to 1985. He was a political officer in Paris ( 1971-78) and then Rome. He served at the US Mission to the United Nations (1967-71). He accompanied Jackie Kennedy on an official visit to Morocco in 1963 and his first posting to Morocco was as Economic Officer at the US Embassy in Rabat. He was a member of the National Security Council at the White House during the Kennedy Presidency in 1963 and also served in Bonn and Berlin and the US Mission to the European Office (1952 -1957).

He reflects that he had the privilege to serve under President Kennedy and each one of his posts was a sheer delight always fascinating hard work. Geneva when he was working with the UN, the excitement of Berlin at the end of the 50's when it was under threat of invasion by Russia. He lost his heart to Morocco when he was first assigned here in the 60's. The US Mission at the UN where he went straight after the seven days war as the specialist on Middle East Affairs for four years. One of the 6 Ambassadors he served in that period was President Bush Senior and they became friends. In Paris he met Vanessa and they have been very much together ever since. After Paris they came Rome where they still spend much of their time and Vanessa has a studio as she does in Marrakech.

He was appointed by President George Bush Senior as Ambassador to Burma but in the congressional hearing for his appointment he courageously spoke out regarding Burma's human rights record and Burma retaliated by refusing to accept his appointment. He reflects sadly that it is 20 years since Aung San Su Kuyi won the election and she has been denied the opportunity of running this wonderful country in anyway and is still imprisoned by the junta and the Burmese people he regards as highly educated and the situation is truly tragic.

He also had a distinguished writing career as a contributing editor and writer for Condé Nast Traveller Magazine, his mother having been a famous editor of Vogue Magazine. Together with Vanessa his wife he co-authored "Key to Rome" a cultural historical guide published by the Getty Museum which Freck describes as a popular and fine scholarly work. They invented the concept of instead of organising the guide by areas; it is compiled by the many eras of Roman civilisation. Their main residence is still Rome.

He was also the senior co-author of Rome Access published by Harper Collins. This guide book won the silver medal for tourism from the City of Rome. He and Vanessa spend their time in Rome when not in Marrakech. He received his degree at Yale in 1951.

He is a member of the Order of St John and has an honorary degree as Doctor of Humane Letters from John Cabot University in Rome of which he was Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees for many years and remains a Trustee. He was director of the Aspen Institute in Italy 1985-1987.This is a think tank which specialised in the Mediterranean area and achieved pioneering work on the concept of Euro Maghreb relations which has now seen the creation of Euromed agreement and Morocco's special status with the EU.

It was a great joy to be appointed to Morocco which he knew well, amongst friend who had risen to be Ministers. It was challenging to meet with His Late Majesty King Hassan II. He tried to influence him on solar energy and democracy. On democracy he said to the King that each country had to adopt its own version of democracy and he quoted Churchill saying that democracy was a very bad system but it was the best we had. His Majesty was amused!

Freck pays tribute to the reforms of King Mohammed VI in terms of democracy and women's rights and putting the emphasis on human as well as economic development.

He is chairman of a solar energy company in Marrakech, NoorWeb. Noor means light in both the spiritual and physical sense. NoorWeb is a rural energy services company that has installed and maintains over 6,000 solar home systems in the region of Taroudant in Southern Morocco. It uses small local enterprises, called Dar Noors, to provide maintenance and sales of solar equipment including solar powered tools that will provide financial benefits for new solar power micro-enterprises, solar hot water heaters and solar electric systems. All was put to spectacularly good use in the building of "The Orchard of the Shooting Stars". The name of the house refers to the shooting stars in the sky they used to see which have now disappeared , perhaps due to atmospheric pollution.

Although it looks as if it has been there for a very long time, every single thing was built form the ground up there was absolutely nothing there, he recalls. This was a part of the Palmeraie which was totally empty, just the odd Palm tree and nothing else. Therefore they could afford to buy two hectares and which they did at the end of the 1970's. Vanessa adds that so much of the Palmeraie was Habous which meant that it wasn't for sale. They wanted to have a house in town and thought about two little riads with a swimming pool in one of them. However each time they went to buy the owner would double the price and they realised he was just testing us to see how much the riad would fetch on the market. Nobody was buying properties in the medina then in 1975 or 1978.

In the last part of the 70's they started looking around an they wanted to be where the action was, but as Vanessa said, none of the now 600 riads as there are now, was owned by a European. The idea that a Moroccan family would sell its riad didn't cross their minds and they found it was impossible. and also we would have wanted one large enough to have a swimming pool and live in the other riad, So they started looking for land in La Palmarie and in those days the Habous owned a very large part of the it .After great difficulty they found the famous Caid Ladayi, who owned the Palais Ladayi in the Medina, his son had inherited this large piece of land and he had never sold anything but he agreed to sell them two hectares and they chose a part of the land which they could afford as the price was low enough and there was nothing was nothing there but six palm trees and sand with some obnoxious tree stumps dotted around which they determined to get rid of .

After three years of irrigating the land and finding a well the tree stumps closest to the well sensed the water and they grew little fronds which reached towards the well, it was staggering to see. Those stumps were from olive trees which had been purposely cut down as low as possible to the ground because they had been useful olive trees to Caid Ladayi at the time he was irrigating this land and using it for agriculture. When he abandoned the agriculture he decided that the best way of preserving the olive trees was to cut them down to their stumps. This saved them. Today they have 80 or fuller grown olive trees which yield 200 very high quality virgin olive oil annually, which was an extra lucky strike for them.

It was been full of surprises right from the beginning! They decided that they wanted to build a totally ecological house and they studied solar energy and solar architecture for over a year going to classes at Yale University, Arizona University and California, all of the places then specialising in solar architecture and practised. Then we visited they famous architect Hassan Fathi who wrote "L'Architecture des Pauvres" in Cairo to see if he would create a solar house for them. He had just won the Agha Khan architectural prize this year and had built a solar house for the Agha Khan's uncle in Cairo.

He was getting old and said that they could copy one of the houses he had already built but they weren't strictly solar houses although they were made in mud brick which they were interested in using. It was ahead of its time and there was the "Whole Earth Catalogue" which was a fantastic magazine with everything in it from bio to solar. They thought they were a bit late with bio and solar technology but now people tell the Vreelands how advanced they were. In fact although all the elements of solar architecture were there, people turned their backs on the idea.

They have had a solar pump with panels for the last twenty five years, since 1985. They brought over voltaic panels from America which generate electricity by light shining on them and they have been turning out electricity for the Vreelands for twenty five years without them having to pay another dirham. Quite a thought for the new energy saving plans being devised in Rabat!

The energy raises water from the well; with solar electricity which makes the pump go and raises the water to the chateau d'eaux and also to the reservoirs. That is the most efficient use of solar energy because you don't need a battery to store the electricity for use when you need it and there is no sun, because what you are storing is pumped up to your highest bathroom in your chateau d'eaux, Freck Vreeland explains.

As far as the house was concerned they then consulted Lord Richard Rogers the world famous architect, who has just been prevented by Prince Charles from building at Chelsea Barracks in London because the Prince did not approve of his modernist style. Freck explains that Richard Rogers had just completed the Pompidou Centre in Paris which was the making of him as an architect and he was a friend of the Vreelands. Freck and Vanressa said that they wanted a solar house but they couldn't afford his fees. However he didn't have a project at the time because despite the fame of the Pompidou Centre nobody would touch him for three years, everyone was in awe of his modernist creation. So they benefited from his advice. He said that the best solar architect was Dominic Michaelis who lives in London but is half French and has lived mostly in France. He was the architect for the house. He worked and planned for years because he was very scientific in his approach and solar architecture was his passion.

He came to Le Palmarie three times a year taking temperature readings and making solar projections in the shadow or the sun with thermometers and electronic temperature readings and then did simulations on the computer (he was an early computer architect) so that he could project how the shadows would fall . He designed, with Vanessa who as an artist had very clear ideas of what she wanted, a traditional house and riad with two towers at either end.

It got slightly out of hand and he twisted the plan round so that point South was the point of the house as opposed to what Vanessa had originally planned. He designed a v shaped house with the v pointing due south and their original concept was three towers. A fourth tower was added to add character and to make it look like an ancient riad, it was deliberately broken.

This is solar passive architecture meaning that it has to be cool in summer and warm in winter. The walls are made of mud, entirely pisé with pisé blocks which are the size of a casket. It is adobe brick in the way that American Indians used them to make cool desert houses which they had seen in Arizona and New Mexico.

The adobe bricks are laid in a very ordered manner the pisé wall ended up being 80 cms thick with a continuous gap called the double envelope for the air to pass through. It goes round the four walls and underneath the roof and down again so that the air circulates and equalises the temperature throughout. These are traditional technologies which you will find in the remains of roman villas and wind towers in the Gulf countries like Bahrain serve a similar purpose. The Vreelands have no air conditioning and there was not of course in ancient architecture. The Almoravid period which saw a great flowering of architecture and art now has only one monument which is the Koubba near the Medersa Ben Youssef in Marrakech. Now Vanessa discovered the second Almoravid building in the ancient Almoravid capital of Aghmat before they built Marrakech in the middle of the 11th Century. Today it is called Hamat . Vanessa found an Almoravid hamam by seeing the three rounded shapes close together on the ground . It was made with gigantic river stones and she climbed inside to see that there werer three perfect vaults and although a greater deal of sand had come in. There were three areas which were the warm , hot and cold rooms of the hamam. Archaeologists now visit this site every year and stay the Vreelands. They have dug down in to the site and discovered the full beauty of the building. An assocition has been formed to preserve the site and Vanessa is a member of this. The Moroccan government has declared it a national heritage site . They are looking for the palace and mosque.


The foundations of the house are a metre underground and this is a Roman idea because earth a metre underground keeps the same temperature all the year round. However some years ago on an Easter Monday they had a flood after lunch round the pool. They went into the sitting room and water was pouring in and filled the metre space of the foundations. There was considerable damage but thanks to the Marrakech fire department with their pumps, they were saved.

Michaelis also ensured that on the wall that faced south, a double hollow brick three floors high and the inner tube was filled with cork for perfect insulation and the outer tube which the sun hits was left empty to allow air to circulate from the ground floor up. The heat passes out in summer and they close a trap door in winter so the warm air stays in.

These ancient architectural ideas have an interest for environmental policy which is now concentrating on saving fuel and energy in houses as electricity becomes ever more expensive. Vanessa recommends that Silicon cells should be installed in houses to help store electricity.

As we are leaving Freck shows me a huge grand sale with eighteenth century paintings and down the square the nursery an exquisite small room with a small four poster bed. The shooting stars may have interrupted their course but this house is a jewel in La Palmaraie.