Dar 91 Essaouira Blog - Luxury guest house holiday accommodation for rent Essaouira » Renovation

Introducing Next Door@Dar 91

admin — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 11:38:00 +0000

Welcome to our labour of love! We wanted to create a romantic place full of quirky details, a comfortable place where people can come and explore the magical city of Essaouira – a town that is firmly in our hearts. During the renovation we had fun, stress, a lot of arguments, sleepless nights, and meetings with bank managers. We’ll be updating the website soon with more details about the place, but for now do please email us for all the info…

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More photos of Next Door

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 19:28:15 +0000

Next Door @ Dar 91 is our lovely new apartment – now taking bookings. To see photos please visit our Facebook page. For more information please email us on info@moroccoholidayhome.com.

Latest photos from the new apartment

admin — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:55:40 +0000

As in all the best photo-shoots, it’s the stuff that’s NOT in shot that’s the most revealing…but for now, sit back and enjoy some bits of the new place that we CAN show you!

Click here to see the photo album on our Facebook page – ‘like’ the main page there and you’ll get to see new photo albums as we add them…eventually we suppose we’ll get to the point where there isn’t a building site behind the photographer!

Class glass

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:02:05 +0000

One of the joys of renovating in Morocco is the abundance of coloured glass. We are particularly loving the deep green and rich yellow of these windows, which we found at the junk market and have brought back to life…

Check out the splashback on that

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Yes indeed, we’re at the point where we can start to show you the charming little details that will hopefully make the new flat a thing of beauty. We’re loving these antique tiles salvaged from a riad on Rue d’Agadir, set into mosaic in the 2nd floor kitchen…

Rubble trouble

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 17:50:36 +0000

One of the most time-consuming (and expensive) aspects of renovating a house in the medina is clearing away all the rubble you create. It all has to be bagged up into little sacks and left on the street overnight, for a horse and cart to take away first thing in the morning.

We’ve produced hundreds of cartloads since starting our renovation…hopefully not too many to go now!!

Within these walls

admin — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 20:50:37 +0000

The walls in our house are not exactly uniform, and all manner of old stones and rubble break off during the ‘grattage’ process.

But even so we were pretty surprised to find this bone set into some of the plaster. Images of mafia-style killings filled our minds, but one of the builders assured us – with an alarming level of certainty – that it comes from “a dog on the beach”. Quite how he’s able to be so specific, we’re not sure…

The mystery of the secret door

admin — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:00:21 +0000

When your house is built onto the battlements of a walled city, you don’t really expect your walls to contain a blocked-off doorway that might at some point have ushered you straight out of the city wall.

But that’s exactly what we found on the ground floor of Dar 91, as shown in this rather grainy photo (You’re just going to have to trust us on this one…it’s pretty dark down there and we didn’t have a lighting crew with us, ok? Ed). Which suggests our house pre-dates the city wall – or that our house was built where there used to be a door into the medina (which seems unlikely).

Kind of annoying, too – could make a rather natty shortcut to the off licence…

Buried treasure…and heavy weaponry?

admin — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 22:17:17 +0000

In the ‘old days’ there was apparently a tradition of families having stashed treasure in Moroccan houses as they fled from unfriendly regimes…so the builders get very excited when they find interesting things amongst the rubble.

We’re not sure the large iron balls the builders found under the floor are worth a lot, but they’re certainly an interesting find and did get them quite excited for a few moments.

Could they be cannonballs? The ends of weightlifting bars? Any other ideas?

Incy Wincy Spider

admin — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:05:00 +0000

“Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout
Down came the rain and washed the spider out
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain
Now Incy Wincy spider went up the spout again”

A strange side-effect of starting the work on the house was the growth of a huge number of spiders’ webs at the lower levels of the house. This may have been partly that existing webs became more visible as dust from the higher levels landed from above. But we prefer to believe that the spiders themselves moved down the building to escape the noise and disturbance. We’ve never seen so many webs all in one place!

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