Author Archives: gbooks

About gbooks

Our luxury travel service puts the ultimate touch on Journeys reflecting a unique experience of a lifetime; we design Legacy Travel for our clients. Our focus on bespoke Journeys entails more than a creative idea and a few reservations. We hand select our land teams, guides, behind the scenes experts - all who reflect our passion for excellence and personalized service. I’m passionate about travel and unique experiences; interested in meeting local people,studying architecture, discovering and learning as much as possible about every city I visit. I adore Paris, yearn to see more of Africa, a recent visit to Istanbul reminds me that there is much more to see in Turkey. A passage to India allowed me to explore the rich and diverse culture, and I barely scratched the surface of this amazing country. Love to sail, discover music and indigenous food of each region, seek out the best markets and design, and of course dine at the local restaurants. I particularly love roaming Africa, recently explored Argentina and India, which deserve another visit. A devoted Francophile, love all things Parisian, world music, excellent wines & champagne.

Morocco Best Handwoven Baskets for Everything!

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Morocco is a land of unique crafts, with many skills dating back hundreds of years. If you’ve scoured the secreted corners of the souks in Marrakech, Tangier and Fez, it often involves accessing a secret passage to discover a room of weavers or embroidery teams. Basket weaving is an old tradition of spread crafts, using materials in strip form, mainly the leaves of a little palm tree called “Mediterranean dwarf palm”, very common on the south slopes of the High Atlas mountains.

In the Moroccan countryside, the palm leaves were used to weave ropes, baskets, baskets of donkey saddles and various objects of domestic and agricultural use. You will find baskets hand crafted with leaves of this palm tree using traditional techniques of making baskets with hand cut leather handles.

Photo courtesy of Mustapha El Ouizguiti

Moroccan or Berber carpets are available everywhere, you hear the coppersmiths and metal workers before you discover their alleys of metal pounding. On my recent Camel Caravan, I was on the hunt for a brass lantern and handmade baskets. Moroccan lanterns are wonderful pieces of hand craftsmanship and dazzle at night. My team has made me aware of a small firm in Marrakech where I can make my own basket and learn embroidery to personalize the basket. My basket weaving skills are nonexistent, in Merida, I attempted a simple straw tassel binding class with local women, a small child would have better results. I’m happy to leave artistry to professionals and support the locals!

Hat at my Villa last year

Morocco’s cultural wealth comes from traditional crafts; diverse and varied materials are finely worked by hand, with machines and tools that remain largely traditional, to make decorative and everyday objects.  Craftsmen handed down from generations, using the same raw materials and maintaining the same tools and craft techniques.

 It is above all a country with a rich past, where traditions are deeply rooted. Moroccan art can be classified into two categories: urban and rural. They are cities of art, rich in important traditions from the Orient or Muslim Spain. The oriental influence is particularly concentrated on the creation of rugs, textiles, and embroidery, while the Andalusian tradition is still seen in the arts of ceramics, metal, wood, and leather. If you haven’t visited the leather dying vats, this is an ancient art form, truly an amazing old craft.


Berber or rural art has an older and more “primitive” origin. Objects often have a practical function: furniture, tools, utensils essential to daily life.

Marrakech crafts are deeply rooted in tradition. Craft is passed on to the next generation and those who learn it use it to create real cultural industries.

I hope to meet the basket weavers in Tangier and will share the Marrakech basket excursion!

  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags
  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags
  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags
  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags
  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags
  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags
  • Marrakech Baskets and Bags

Handmade, but practical objects – let me know if you need a handmade straw hat or a woven market basket with handmade leather handles and your name embroidered on it!

Art Notes Caillebotte – Painting Men – Secrets behind Caillebotte

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Among the hundreds of Impressionist paintings, the Floor Scrapers has always been one of my favorites. I’m not certain where I first viewed it in person, but I’ve never forgotten it. The neutral pallet ranging from bright sunlight to dark shadows combine to produce stark contrasts. An obvious variance to pastel impressionist paintings.

Autumn opening for the exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay focuses on Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and his predilection for masculine forms and portraits of men and seeks to examine this artist’s profoundly radical modernity through the lens of art history’s changing perspective on 19th-century forms of masculinity.

In a desire to produce a new, authentic form of art, Caillebotte took his subjects from his surroundings (Haussmann’s Paris, the country houses around the capital), his male acquaintances (his brothers, the workers employed by his family, his boating friends) , and ultimately from his own life. In response to the realist movement, he introduced new figures into his paintings: an urban worker, a man on a balcony, a sportsman, and even an intimate portrait of a male nude at his ‘toilette’. In an era when virility and republican fraternity prevailed, but traditional masculinity was also in crisis for the first time, these new, powerful images challenged the established order, both social and sexual. Beyond his own identity – that of a young rich Parisian bachelor – Caillebotte also brought profound questions into the male condition at the heart of Impressionism and Modernism.

This project was inspired by the recent acquisition of two of Caillebotte’s major works, by the J.Paul Getty Museum ( Young Man at His Window ) and the Musée d’Orsay ( A Boating Party ), and centers around a masterpiece from this artist, Paris Street; Rainy Day, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition, which presents around 70 pieces, includes Caillebotte’s most important paintings of people, as well as pastels, sketches, photographs, and documents.

This event is organized in the year of the 130th anniversary of the artist’s death (1894), which is also the date when his outstanding collection of Impressionist paintings was bequeathed to the French government. To mark the occasion, the entire bequest will be on show in a temporary exhibition in one of the museum’s permanent galleries, reproducing the 1897 opening of the “Caillebotte Gallery” at the Musée du Luxembourg.

Mostly active in the 1870s and 1880s, Caillebotte stands apart from the other Impressionists for being the one artist to frequently depict men, and often in ambiguous scenes where one is never entirely sure of the artist’s intention or the viewpoint of the male figures within.

This is one of a long series of exhibitions, beginning with a major retrospective in 1994-1995 (Paris, Chicago), which have allowed the public to reconnect with Gustave Caillebotte (1848-1894) and have shed light on certain aspects of his work: the Yerres period, the connection between his paintings and photography, and his passion for garden design, among others.

Paris: Musée d’Orsay – October 08th, 2024 to January 19th, 2025. The exhibition will be on display at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, from February 25 to May 25, 2025, and at the Art Institute of Chicago from June 29 to October 5, 2025.