A first look at Villa Fayoum, Egypt’s artiest guesthouse

The small village of Tunis sits on the southern shore of Qarun Lake on the edge of the Fayoum Oasis in Egypt. If you game Cairo’s infamously snarly traffic well, you can reach it from the city centre in less than two hours. But Fayoum exists entirely outside Cairo’s gravitational pull. Its palm groves extend miles south from Qarun’s shores in a cloak of dusty emerald; to the lake’s north is desert as far as the eye can see. Houses with rammed-earth walls and domed roofs,…