Just south of Dakar, the village of Toubab Dialaw sits along the Petite Côte, where rust-red cliffs drop into long stretches of sand and ocean. Scattered along the shoreline are painted pirogues (WoI Aug 2022) belonging to the Lebou people, among the area’s first inhabitants. Their knowledge of the sea is shaped as much by generations of fishing as by a deep-rooted respect for water, intertwined with their spiritual beliefs. It’s a sensibility shared by the late Haitian writer/artist Gérard Chenet, who settled here in the 1970s. ‘Gérard loved the sea, he loved water, he loved to swim. He was truly in his element here,’ recalls his eldest daughter, Natacha. Chenet was drawn to the persistence of ancestral practices around the village, among them the Ndeup healing ceremonies. In these rituals, with their echoes of Haitian Vodou, he found a culture that felt, on a deeper level, familiar.
Perched on an outcrop above the Atlantic, Sobo Badè, the hotel and artist’s retreat Chenet realised here, unfolds as a cluster of interconnected dwellings, terraces and gardens, all oriented toward the horizon. It began modestly, with a single thatched-roof house that Chenet built himself, alongside local craftsmen, using what was readily available. The area’s distinctive reddish stone forms its walls, while marble offcuts, bamboo, wooden slats and shells are folded into the structure. There was never a single finished project in mind. ‘It built itself little by little,’ recalls his wife, Sylvaine Roux, who has since her arrival in the 1990s seen the place take form through instinct and necessity.
Chenet was one of the first outsiders to arrive in Toubab Dialaw. As the years went on, Sobo Badè played host to artists and collectives such as Tenq, Laboratoire Agit’Art and the world-renowned dancer Germaine Acogny, who would later establish the dance school Ecole des Sables nearby. What began with visits from friends – poets, musicians, actors – soon outgrew the original house. ‘There was no plan,’ Sylvaine says. ‘We needed to live, so we began building spaces to receive people.’ A room was added where there was space, then another; a kitchen followed, then places to gather. ‘It’s not like a conventional hotel,’ notes Rachel, Chenet’s youngest daughter. ‘It’s more like: there is land here, so we build.’ Chenet’s open door ethos meant the site grew in response to those who passed through it, each addition cementing it as a space for artistic and cultural exchange. ‘If the surrounding land hadn’t been taken,’ Rachel adds, ‘it would have spread much further.’ Even near the end of his life, Sylvaine recalls, Chenet was still thinking about what to build next.
Born in 1927 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Chenet came of age in a politically charged climate, co-founding a student newspaper that fell foul of state censorship; he fled the country in 1955. In the following decade, he moved between Canada, France and Guinea, where he taught history in Conakry after independence under Ahmed Sékou Touré. By the mid-1960s, disillusioned by successive political constraints, he arrived in Dakar, enticed by Léopold Sédar Senghor’s arts-boosting policies.
There, he worked as a cultural adviser while frequenting the newly established Théâtre National Daniel Sorano, where he performed and wrote plays. His earlier research into the life of El Hadj Omar, a key figure in the Islamisation of West Africa, informed much of his work. In Toubab Dialaw, locals tell of that scholar causing fresh springs to swell from the beaches – another anchor to the place for Chenet. ‘Some say you can see the face of El Hadj Omar in the rocks,’ Natacha adds. For her father, it was not just the legend that resonated, but what it represented: the ousting of older spiritual systems by imported religions, a tension he also saw in Haiti.
That relationship with belief – and interest in how it meets the environment – finds lyrical expression at Sobo Badè, where spiritual references are embedded into the architecture and landscape. Serpentine forms, representing spirits of water and life, appear along columns and paths, while elsewhere sculpted figures emerge from the floor, leaning into the surrounding vegetation. Paths slip between curved walls and low archways, opening on to courtyards where trees push through stone and shade settles unevenly across the ground. Interiors keep cool and dim, punctuated with paintings and carvings, before giving way again to open air.
‘I think Sobo Badè is above all a vision,’ Rachel says. ‘An idealistic one where nature and art bring people together, rather than divide.’ People in the village still recall the symbiotic relationship Chenet formed with the community, encouraging them all to take part. ‘He wanted everyone to be an artist,’ says Rachel. That spirit persists in Toubab Dialaw to this day. In 2000, Chenet and Sylvaine founded the Théâtre de l’Engouement, an artist residency with a 750-seat open-air theatre, where workshops and performances unfold across disciplines, and a medicinal-plant trail (developed with cultural/social lab Kër Thiossane and botanist network Tela Botanica) runs through the site. A decade later, this vision took on a broader structure with the creation of the APDD – a non-profit organisation dedicated to the economic, sociocultural and ecological development of the village – which hosts the annual Dialaw Festival. Now a staple in the community, it has run for 14 years.
‘There are people who have been here for a very long time,’ Rachel says. She gestures to Diouf, a builder-turned-potter who now shapes clay in a shaded corner of the hotel, where he runs workshops for children and visiting groups. She thinks of Amadou, who arrived as a young man, taking part in rehearsals and daily work, and who still returns, even after retirement.
Since Gérard Chenet’s death in 2022, Sobo Badè has continued in much the same way it always has; skills, gestures and ways of being are passed on informally, carried across generations. ‘It becomes a school,’ suggests Rachel, ‘not just for performers, but for spectators.’ Learning happens in passing, in repetition, in proximity. For Sylvaine, that continuity is assured by something less visible but no less present: ‘Spirituality is the cement that holds us all together. Art, culture and spirituality are the three legs of the chair.’ It is this sentiment that continues to resonate, drawing people back again and again from across the world.
Sobo Badè, Route de Toubab Dialaw, Toubab Dialaw 10000, Senegal 00 221 33 836 03 56. Visit sobo-bade.com)
A version of this article appears in the June 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
