Blog
Where each craft comes from, what it is made of, and the history that produced it. Every article ends with the workshops where you can learn it.
Why the maâlem lays the panel face down
Zellige is not painted. Each piece is chiselled by hand then laid face down, and the master judges the whole from its reverse.
Lime, black soap and a stone
Tadelakt isn't waterproof simply because it's polished. In Marrakech, the lime plaster is first compressed with a stone, closing its pores, then sealed with black soap. It's this two-step process — not the shine of polishing alone — that has made hammams and riads possible for centuries.
The clay that built a city
Safi is Morocco's pottery city because the earth bordering it gave potters abundant clay within easy reach. Around that deposit grew a whole district, the Potters' Hill — a historic monument since 1920 — where wheels still turn, wood kilns still fire, and glazes still run green and turquoise, workshop after workshop.
Painting on cedar
Morocco's painted ceilings rest on a tree, a pigment and a patience no one measures in hours any more.
Writing without a page
On Amazigh rugs from the Atlas, diamonds, zigzags and crosses form woven signs researchers read as meaningful — an interpretation, not a decoded, fixed code. Wool, natural dye, the vertical loom and mother-to-daughter transmission are the documented story; part of today's popular symbol-canon also traces back to Prosper Ricard's colonial cataloguing in the 1920s-1930s.
Copper, and the noise it makes
You hear Seffarine square before you see it. The hammering is the process, not its side effect.