Cleaning in the medina, Marrakech

The Marrakech medina is the historic walled city, ringed by ramparts, organised around Jemaa el-Fna, the souks and a tangle of derbs — the narrow medina alleys — reached through the gates. Its building stock resembles nothing else in the city, and it dictates the method entirely.

The model is the courtyard house: the riad, with its interior garden, and the dar, whose courtyard is paved. One to three storeys, a roof terrace, often a douiria as an annexe, sometimes a well.

Part of the stock has been restored to a high standard — guest houses, private residences, agency offices — while the rest remains dense family housing. Added to that are fondouks, craftsmen's workshops and shops in the souks.

The buildings are old: earth and lime walls, structures that move, services often re-run on the surface, narrow steep staircases up to the roof terrace. None of it stands the running water you allow yourself elsewhere.

And above all, the floors. It is here, and nowhere else in Marrakech, that the three traditional finishes meet inside the same house:

• zellige, glazed terracotta mosaic, whose joints are made of plaster;
• bejmat, unglazed terracotta laid on edge, porous right the way through;
• tadelakt, a lime render polished and then soaped, on wet-room floors and hammam walls.

To which are added stone flags, old cement tiles and, in recent restorations, contemporary tiling in the service rooms. On the quotation, that whole mosaic comes down to two lines: what is standard tiling, and everything else. It is the share of "everything else" that sets the price of a riad. The full protocol is described on cleaning traditional floors.

Here is the sentence that structures this whole page: on a traditional floor, a mistake in product choice is not a poor result, it is destruction. What follows is not a stylistic precaution, it is elementary chemistry, and each case has its own consequence.

• Tadelakt is polished, soaped lime. An alkaline detergent that is too aggressive matts it permanently: the surface loses its sheen and goes dull, uniformly, with no way back. An acid pits it — minute craters appear, and the wall no longer closes up. You do not re-polish attacked tadelakt: you redo the render.
• Bejmat is porous terracotta. It drinks whatever you pour on it, including the thing you were trying to lift out. A degreaser left to work migrates into the body of the tile and comes back out as a bloom for months. Too much water, on an old bed, lifts it.
• Zellige has plaster joints. Mechanical action applied even slightly too firmly hollows them out, an acid dissolves them, and the tesserae work loose. The glaze itself scratches more easily than people think.

Our protocol follows from that, and it is short:

1. Diagnosis before the price is confirmed, from your photos or at a visit: exact nature of the floor, state of the joints, any earlier protective treatment, origin of the soiling.
2. A compulsory test patch, in an inconspicuous corner, treated and then dried completely — an old floor is not judged wet. You approve it before we roll anything out.
3. No acid product, no aggressive mechanical action, ever, whatever result is hoped for. The treatment is matched to the material: bejmat is not crystallised, and we do not sand.
4. And a refusal, where one is called for. If the zellige has worked loose, if the joints are hollowed down to the substrate or if the tadelakt has already been pitted, no cleaning will give you what you are expecting. We refer you to a zellige craftsman or a tadelakt applicator rather than invoicing a job that would make the state of it worse.

It is not spectacular, and it is exactly what this market lacks: most of the damage we find in the medina was not done by the building works. It was done by the cleaning that followed.

Three kinds of request shape our work inside the ramparts. Prices are incl. VAT, and they are the same as in the rest of Marrakech.

1. Post-construction cleaning after restoration. This is the main item. Any floor that is not standard tiling — zellige, bejmat, tadelakt, stone — counts at 30 MAD per m²; the tiling in the service rooms at 20 MAD per m². You declare the interior area, floors added together, leaving out the riad garden. A courtyard house comes under the villa or riad minimum, 7,500 MAD: a 180 m² dar in bejmat and zellige comes to 5,400 MAD of line items, brought up to 7,500 MAD. The roof terrace is added if you ask for it — 10 MAD per m² on standard tiles, 30 MAD per m² on any other surface — provided it is flat, guarded and reached by the staircase; no pitched roof. Many marks of paint, adhesive or cement: +20%; thick residue almost everywhere: +40%, after a diagnosis on photos. How it unfolds is described on resetting a riad.
2. Upholstery and rugs in family houses. Rugs 30 MAD per m² — a 3 × 4 m rug, 12 m², comes to 360 MAD, brought up to the 400 MAD textile minimum if it is the only item —, mattresses 300 MAD single and 400 MAD double, L-shaped sofa from 550 MAD. Wool or a delicate fabric: the method is confirmed on photos. Everything is treated in place; drying takes half a day to a full day, with the room left unused until then. On an old stain, no 100% result is guaranteed.
3. Windows and patio doors onto the courtyard. 75 MAD a window up to 2 m², the whole frame counted once, 150 MAD a patio door up to 4 m², 400 MAD minimum call-out charge. Many windows onto the derb are grilled: if the glass can still be reached behind the bars, +20%; if the grille stops us reaching it, we cannot clean it. Up to 3 m from the courtyard floor, base price; between 3 and 5 m, by pole, +25%, if the photo shows it can be done; above 5 m, nothing: neither a cherry picker nor ropes.

For the routine upkeep of a lived-in house, standard housekeeping by the day — 800 MAD a day in an apartment, 1,200 MAD in a villa, one person included, 250 MAD for each extra person — covers dust, floors, kitchen and bathrooms; it covers neither building residue, nor upholstery, nor specialist window cleaning.

Indicative prices based on the areas declared, confirmed after photos or a visit; no supplement is committed without your agreement.

In most derbs, no vehicle gets through. The van stops at the nearest drop-off point, and everything after that is carried — by hand or by handcart, over distances running from a few tens to several hundred metres.

What we settle before setting off, and never on the morning itself:

• The usable width of the passage. Some derbs are under a metre wide, with turns that rule out long objects. The equipment has to be demountable: a single-piece machine stays in the vehicle.
• The inventory of what goes in. Once inside the house, going back for an accessory costs a full round trip. The list is settled at the last square metre of the vehicle.
• The arrival time. At souk hours, the crowds and the stalls make carrying impracticable on certain routes. That is a planning input, not bad luck.
• Water and electricity. Available in a restored house, uncertain in an old dar. The actual flow at the tap and the available amperage are checked beforehand, because hot-water extraction cannot be run off a trickle. Without water and power on the day, we cannot do the job.
• The rubble. We remove neither rubble nor items to be thrown away. In the medina, the handcart trips are the restoration contractor's business, and the house has to be emptied of it — just as the craftsmen have to have left — before we arrive.
• Getting up to the roof terrace. Narrow, steep staircases, often with no half-landing. Window equipment goes up in separate parts.

Finally, a point the medina imposes more than anywhere else: we do not let water run. On earth and lime walls and old floor structures, water escaping from one room does not stop at the threshold. The work is done at controlled humidity, with immediate extraction.

Our undertaking in the medina comes down to three lines, and the third is the most important.

1. The protocol appears on the quotation, floor by floor: method, machine, product. On old materials, a price with no written protocol is not a quotation.
2. The test patch is treated, dried and approved with you before anything is rolled out. It is included, it is not charged separately, and you can say no once you have seen it.
3. The scope of what we refuse is announced before the work, not discovered at the end. Anything that belongs to re-grouting, replacing tesserae or making good a render is not our trade, and we say so rather than attempting it.

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Describe the house — the nature of the floors, the storeys, the derb it is reached by, the state it is in after the works —, attach three to five photos, and have the job priced. The other sectors we serve appear on the full list of areas we cover.