It’s morning, and I am meeting my friend Benoit, a French interior designer. We are meeting at Bab al Khemis, which means Thursday’s Door in Arabic. All around Marrakech’s old city, known as the medina, there are babs, or huge carved entryways. Each bab has its own name, and Bab al Khemis it is the entryway to the city’s equivalent of the flea market. Outside the bab, vendors are beginning to throng, displaying broken bits and bobs, as well as an occasional gem or two.
Benoit arrives, and we kiss, French-style, on both cheeks. For a number of years, Benoit designed interiors for the King of Morocco. Now he and his young family have moved to Marrakech and recently have bought a piece of land. Close friends of ours, Benoit and his charming wife Zoo, also a designer, are giving us a helping hand with our guest house interiors.
In T-shirts and cargo pants, we are ready for action. Today we are looking for antique doors and other architectural remnants that will help give our guest houses some character. We have brought along with us one of Chris's employees, Khalid, who can be counted on to negotiate in Moroccan dialect so fast that it makes your heads spin.
We venture through the bab and down the narrow streets of the medina. Old furniture spills out of shop fronts. We stop briefly to look at a huge and somewhat battered birdhouse but the owner wants too much for it. We then gaze wonderingly at a 15 foot high metal silhouette of a man playing tennis – he must have adorned a tennis club in the 1940s. An antique door is examined but it is meant for an outside gate. We continue to work our way into the medina, checking prices, snapping pictures, and taking measurements. As I turn the corner, I spy something out of the corner of my eye: two coffered ceiling panels from the Glaoui period. The Glaouis ruled over a sweep of southern Morocco from the 18th century until Morocco's independence in 1956. About the Glaouis, The Rough Guide writes:
"El Glaoui , the famous pasha of Marrakech during the French rule...was a personal friend of Winston Churchill. Cruel and magnificent in equal measure, he was also one of the most spectacular party-givers .... At the extraordinary difas (banquets) held in his Marrakech palace, nothing was impossible– hashish and opium were freely available for the Europeans and Americans to experiment with, and to his guest [he] gave, literally, whatever they wanted, whether it might be a diamond ring, a present of money in gold, or a Berber girl... from the High Atlas.”
Hmm... Berber girls from the High Atlas aside, these old coffered ceilings have real potential. They are almost 9 feet tall, matching, and have just arrived in the shop from an estate. Entirely hand painted in dark reds and deep golds with flower motifs, they are in very good condition for their age. Khalid moves in for the negotiations. He wheedles, cajoles and pleads with the store owner. I stand nearby, saying nothing but offering my bag of peanuts purchased from the peanut-selling-man, just outside. The shop owner chews and argues with Khalid, his hands gesticulating. The price slowly begins to drop. Phone numbers are exchanged.
Back in the car, Benoit and I discuss how the coffered ceilings might be installed, if I were to purchase them -- perhaps suspended from the ceiling with a drop of a foot or so, or perhaps deeply inset into a recessed ceiling. I can tell Benoit likes them. I like them, too. A lot. I imagine guests lying on their beds and looking up. Would they appreciate this expensive feature, I wonder. My brain whirs. Hours later, Khalid takes the crumpled slip of paper from his pocket. He deciphers the strange handwriting. He makes the call.
The ceilings are mine.
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PS Blogger/Blogspot also is not letting me leave comments on your blogs. I am electronically challenged. ~Sigh.
