We have just met yet again with our architect (although finally the meetings are feeling productive) to look at the draft plans he’s made of the existing house and to discuss the changes we want to make. This was quite challenging as we have strong ideas about how to make the house work as a restaurant and know what the requirements are, whereas he was more interested in making the house more symmetric and in-keeping with traditional medina houses. We listened to his ideas, which were all very nice, but had to keep pointing out the impracticalities. For example, ‘no, we can’t extend that salon into the (proposed) toilet and put a nice window in there because we need the toilet for our customers’, and ‘no we can’t keep the toilet in the kitchen (where it’s currently located) because it’s the kitchen!’.
He also wants us to extend the wooden corniche on the second level so it wraps around all four walls (it’s currently on two, under the balconies, on opposite sides) and have intricate plaster work around the windows into the courtyard to pretty it all up.
This raised an issue that Vince and I have been discussing for a while. Houses in the medina have a variety of features which can include zellij tiling (on the floors, walls, skirtings, stairs and fountains in varying degrees), painted woodwork (doors, ceilings, corniches), coloured glass windows, curved metalwork (on balconies, windows and terraces) and intricately carved plaster (around windows, above doorways, edging ceilings etc). The number of features you have can be seen as a good or bad thing according to your taste. Personally we find the bigger, very ornate houses a bit full on and trust me, you wouldn’t want to be facing some of the rooms first thing in the morning with a hangover.
The amount and type of decoration also indicates the period your house was built, as these features and their quantity came in and out of fashion – like brown, swirly wallpaper or shag-pile carpets for instance. Also you have to be careful with plasterwork, as unless you have very good craftsmen it can look chunky and very average.
We are relatively undecorated in comparison to many of the houses we’ve seen, with no plasterwork, only a few rooms with zellij on the floor, a couple of pretty windows and a small amount of painted wood. Our standout feature is the zellij on the walls of the courtyard which comes to about waist height. As people came through our house we heard a lot of differing opinions. The ‘more is more’ crowd suggested we redo all the floors with traditional zellij, put in plasterwork around all the windows and put wooden beams on the ceiling of the third floor extension which is currently concrete. This approach is fine if you have buckets of money and want to recreate the completely traditional look.
The other school of thought is to work with what you have and not get drawn in to feeling you have to make your house overly fussy. This is what we were thinking, and after seeing houses without the plasterwork and wall-to-wall zellij we were convinced. The spaces felt cleaner, simpler and more relaxing. Considering we have a relatively small space to work with and that once you put in all the tables, chairs, lighting and deco you will have plenty to look at anyway, we were loathe to clutter it up even more.
We had already decided to pull up the modern floor tiles and redo them with plainer flooring. I wanted to put marble in the courtyard and lower salon and was delighted to find out that rather than being unaffordable, marble is actually one of the cheaper options. Zellij (intricate mosaic-style tiling) on the other hand, is very pricey and time-consuming because of the work involved.
The only feature we want to ‘create’ as such, is a fountain in the courtyard. Currently there’s an old fountain in the kitchen but the tiling will be lost when we turn it into a commercial kitchen. In order to save it, we want to relocate the tiles to the back wall of the courtyard and build a small basin to catch the water. In the summer, the sound and presence of water will hopefully have a cooling effect on the centre of the house and will also serve as a simple central feature for the courtyard. Beyond this though, we have no intention of going in for fancy detailing.
So when the architect started suggesting additional features, Vince and I shot each other ‘here we go again’ looks and after smiling and nodding we tactfully said we’d go back and look at the house and consider it.
We also need to put in windows for what will be the office on the top floor. At the moment there’s no solid roof on this room and just a grill where the windows will be. I’m a big fan of light and want fairly simple windows with big panes of glass. Our architect wants to put in three fancy arches and traditional windows. However the top level is a more recent addition and has no traditional features. As this is where we’ll be living we’d prefer to create a space that’s different from the restaurant downstairs, to help us separate our work and home life.
Simplicity seems to be a very un-Moroccan concept though. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see…
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