The organizers do not want their runners picked off, like basketball players running into a tile pillar in some old church basement gym.
In the windy white coastal city of Essaouira, the similarly named L'Heure Bleue opened in 2004 in a former 19th-century palace after a three-year renovation in which artisans from all over the country restored the tiles, pillars and intricate woodwork and filled the rooms with silk couches and carpets in a mix of oriental, African, colonial English and Portuguese styles.
It offers multicolored mosaic tiles at its entrance and around the warming flames of an open brick oven, a terra-cotta tile floor, brick pillars, paper over blue clothed tables, flamboyantly colored cylinders containing candles and tall, sheer curtained windows.
Here are the blue-and-white star tiles and intricate pillars you'd expect of Islamic architecture and the delicious rammed-earth pink of walls that is entirely local.
With sleek, dark wood floors, white stacked-tile walls and pillars bathed in sky-blue light, the space — designed by the architectural team behind the restaurants Craft, Gramercy Tavern and the Modern — feels more like a specialty food shop than an alcove in a chain hotel.
The wooden front door opens into a large hall with cream-colored ceramic tile floors, exposed brick pillars, and a modern, open staircase.
Much of the chapel — a masterpiece of Baroque architecture, begun in 1571 and finished in 1659 — is covered in gold leaf; nearly every square inch is adorned with painted panels, statues of angels and saints, onyx pillars, Talavera tile, vines, flowers, swirls and arabesques of exuberant golden tracery.
Inside its dark, Art Nouveau-ish space, decorated with glittery mirrored tiles and Gaudi-like pillars, I swirled my "fettuccine" around a fork, wondering how in the world the chef had managed to craft something that looked exactly like Italian noodles from strips of a corn tortilla.
This underfloor heating system was present in the tepidarium, the caldarium and the laconicum where the floors were supported on pillars of tiles or pilae.
