Forex Tycoon’s Daughter: From Hating to Loving Tangier’s Charms

As a child, Sarah Wheeler and her sisters, Jacquetta and Charlotte, would go to Dar Sinclair, a villa built by their maternal great-grandfather, the British architect Jack Sinclair, in the city of Tangier, to spend the summer holidays. These were not pleasant moments for the teenager. "I hated the food, the weather. I thought it was dirty. I was a little English teenager," she says. The same reaction was seen in her father, Stuart Wheeler. During a crossing of the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain, the pioneer of Forex trading and the CFD industry had complained of a "too hot" climate. Her mother, the famous photographer Tessa Codrington, who inherited Dar Sinclair when she was in her twenties, extolled the virtues of the residence, according to The New York Times.

As an adult, Sarah changes her perception of the city of Tangier. After the death of English fashion show producer Johnnie Gairdner, a close friend of her mother, who had bequeathed his dilapidated house, Lalla Yenou, located near the Dar Sinclair house, to Codrington, she offered her daughter to decorate the house. "My mother asked me if I was interested in decorating Johnnie’s house, but I told her I would only do it if it was mine," she says. Her mother agreed, on the condition that Sarah give up her future share of Dar Sinclair, which had become a superb villa, to her sisters (at that time, Jacquetta was already a well-known model). She therefore inherited Johnnie’s house.

She moved into the Lalla Yenou house, which was in danger of ruin. With the help of the Milanese landscape architect and novelist Umberto Pasti, she transformed the residence. She later built a second building there with the help of architect Cosimo Sesti and Pasti. Today, she feels more at home in Tangier than in London. She simply feels at home.