PALOMA PICASSO

When Paloma Picasso was nine years old, she made a painting. "I thought, 'This is it. This is not for me,'" says Paloma while sipping late-afternoon tea on the verdant garden terrace of her house in the Palmeraie area of Marrakech. "You can certainly understand my fear of drawing, no?" Well, yes. Who wouldn't be at least a little bit afraid of the long shadow cast by her infamous father, Pablo Picasso, whom Paloma refers to as the greatest painter in the world?

Of course, Paloma did eventually find her own way, and in a visual medium that separated her from her artistic legacy. This year she marks three decades of designing jewelry for Tiffany & Co., where, as longtime friend and Tiffany design director emeritus John Loring puts it, "she was just what the company needed to take Tiffany into the 21st century." And after many paparazzi-flashbulb-lit years of couture shows and nights out in New York and Paris, Paloma has withdrawn from the glam circuit to focus on what's most important to her. Along with designing, that short list includes her French husband of 10 years, Eric Thévenet, and her two homes, one on Lake Geneva in Lausanne, Switzerland, and this splendid retreat in Marrakech, where the sun sets gloriously by dipping behind the Atlas Mountains in the distance. "I feel perfectly happy here," she says with a smile.

Compared with her late friend Yves Saint Laurent's lavish estate, the property, built in 1980 in the thick of an old olive plantation, is a simple place. There's a main house with three bedrooms, an outdoor pool, a small indoor-pool-cum-solarium, and a one-bedroom guesthouse. Its charm comes from the lush four-acre garden, populated mostly by about 70 olive trees as well as dozens of citrus, pomegranate, and fig trees and soaring date palms.

The couple bought the house in 2006. The place had good bones but needed buffing up. "A sleeping beauty," Thévenet recalls. They rehauled the patio, replacing an elaborate two-tiered fountain with a shallow dish-shaped one. Out went the overgrown plants and in went neat brick. Finally, the open roof was enclosed with glass. In the large multipurpose family room, with both a living and dining area, they installed two built-in bookcases that are painted a cheerful red. They are stacked with art tomes and bibelots, and amid them lean two tiny Picasso gouaches, one a portrait of his former lover Dora Maar.

Not surprisingly, art is a common element throughout. In the salon are two lovely paintings by Paloma's mother, Françoise Gilot. One is a portrait of Paloma as a child. She's sitting in the garden of Pablo Picasso's home in Vallauris, in the South of France, dressed in a yellow pinafore and holding a pinwheel. The other, hung next to the fireplace, is of two dancers in a studio. Gilot, a respected artist in her own right, met Picasso when she was 21 and he was 61. She lived with him for seven years and is also the mother of Paloma's older brother, Claude. Gilot left Picasso in 1953 when Paloma was four years old, but Paloma continued to spend her summers and school breaks with him in the South of France. "When I see some of his paintings, it brings back the memories of when he was creating them," Paloma says. Those memories aren't entirely rosy. Picasso cut Paloma and Claude off in 1964, refusing to see them after their mother published her tell-all memoir. Now 88, Gilot lives in New York and still paints.

Paloma first met Tiffany's Loring when she was 16. It was at a lunch at Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo in Venice. He recalls, "When Paloma was a teenager, she was extraordinarily shy and put upon by people staring and pointing at her because she was Picasso's daughter. It reduced her to tears." After attending the Université de Paris in Nanterre, Paloma began designing costumes for avant-garde theater productions in Paris. For one, she fashioned necklaces out of rhinestones plucked from Folies Bergères bikinis found at a flea market. The pieces were lauded by fashion critics. This drove her to study jewelry design, and soon enough she was making bijoux for her friend Yves Saint Laurent and for Greek jewelry brand Zolotas. When her father died in 1973, she took a break to help catalog his estate and establish the Musée Picasso in Paris. In 1979, Loring was named design director for Tiffany and without a second thought hired the young Paloma, who by then was a fixture on the international fashion scene.

Those were heady days. She had first met Saint Laurent at a dinner party in Paris. He was immediately taken with her 1940s garb — "very Gloria Swanson," Paloma once told me of a shimmering black dress with big shoulders she'd found at a flea market and topped off with a pink turban with gray feathers. Afterward, Saint Laurent sketched and sketched until he came up with his infamous 1940s collection, which was shown in January 1971.

Though Paloma was also close to the designer's rival Karl Lagerfeld, she became one of Saint Laurent's muses, along with Betty Catroux and Loulou de la Falaise. You could see the dresses he designed with her in mind, with the Spanish themes, the reds and blacks, and anything with a portrait neckline that would show off her pale skin and graceful neck.

When Paloma married Argentinean playwright Rafael López Sánchez in 1978, she played the fashion diplomat. She wore a white Saint Laurent spencer with a bloodred ruffled satin blouse for the civil ceremony. Then she changed into a lipstick-red satin Lagerfeld dress with a puff skirt for the wedding banquet, which Lagerfeld hosted at his home on the Left Bank. It was the first time in years the two feuding designers managed a social détente.

Paloma is no longer a fashion-show fixture, but she's still an influence. Recently, she has been cited as an inspiration by Marc Jacobs and Loewe's Stuart Vevers, who created a ladylike top-handle bag with a hook closure called the Paloma.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Paloma launched all sorts of lines. For one, she created three perfumes — Paloma Picasso, Tentations, and Minotaure — for L'Oréal. "Paloma Picasso was a self-portrait," she says, "and I still wear it, so I did the right job for me." She also designed accessories, wallpaper and home fabrics, sunglasses, linens, china and crystal for Villeroy & Boch, and her signature red lipstick, Mon Rouge. Though the Paloma Picasso perfume is still being produced, eventually the rest of the product lines came to an end — as did her marriage. "I felt I had to prove myself," she says of that bustling era. "I don't have anything to prove anymore. I can relax."

The site of much of that relaxation is Marrakech. Paloma and Thévenet come here for a month or two several times a year. Sometimes they host friends and family, but more often it's just the two of them. They share a passion for automobile rallies and have competed seven times in the Maroc Classic. He drives while Paloma navigates. Apart from that, life here has an easy rhythm. They usually have lunch in the garden, with local dishes prepared by their longtime cook, Fadna.

Her Moroccan wardrobe is chic but distinctly comfortable: flowing colorful caftans in the summer and, on cool winter afternoons, soft, ample sweaters and slim trousers made for her by a local tailor. She keeps her jewelry, such as her ropes of lapis lazuli beads and long chains of hammered gold beads from her Tiffany collection, in a shallow green ceramic Moroccan bowl.

They occasionally go into the Medina, the old walled city of Marrakech, for tea at the Café de France, shopping at Mustapha Blaoui's Ali Baba-like decor store, or dinner at La Trattoria. On rare occasions, they attend splashy parties too, like the recent reopening of Hôtel La Mamounia. They eluded the paparazzi, allowing the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston to make the headlines.

Paloma also works, sketching jewelry designs, for which she finds inspiration all around her. "Here," she says, pointing to the fountain. "I used these tiles for my first design for the Zellige collection for Tiffany." The intricate openwork bracelets and necklaces mirror the lattice copper lanterns throughout the house. She found the idea for the unique tassel pieces in the Medina. "You see tassels everywhere — big, small, huge!" she laughs.

She faxes the sketches to her studio at Tiffany in New York. There, a team of eight designers turns them into prototypes, which are brought to her wherever she may be. Meetings are conducted via Skype. She produces two major collections a year. This year, to celebrate her 30th anniversary, she has already launched three new collections: Marrakesh (including the openwork bracelets), Hammered Circles, and Paloma's Dove, which features, most appropriately, a dove pendant.

Having been named by her father in honor of the dove he drew that became the symbol of the World Peace Conference in 1949, Paloma went through a process for designing the latter that wasn't easy. She did about 200 drawings. "I didn't want it to look like a Pablo Picasso dove," she explains. "One looked like a Braque, and I thought, 'No! Can't have that!'" She did finally settle on a perfect version. "One looked like an angel. I've always been proud that my name stands for peace, and I thought, The angel of peace; that's my combination," she says. "A dove that will protect you."