Our man in Marrakech

Musti’s courtyard doesn’t announce itself. You come in off the lane and the sky opens above you, and then you see the rugs. They hang from the balconies on every side, two storeys up, drying like washing in the sun. Below them, on marbled floor tiles, they are stacked in columns taller than a man. Hundreds in this space alone. Thousands, he tells me, across all of them.

Musti has been collecting for years. He is our rug dealer, though the word doesn’t quite fit. A dealer sells you what you ask for. Musti shows you what exists.

That distinction matters more than it first appears. These rugs aren’t commercially produced. There is no catalogue, no order form, no choice of size and colour sent off to a workshop. Each one was woven by a woman who decided, at her loom, how large it would be, which colours she would use, and what pattern would emerge. Some are wild with red and orange. Some are almost silent: cream wool and a few dark lines, like a drawing made in one breath. None of them repeat.

So you don’t choose a rug here so much as recognise one. The weaver made her decisions long before you arrived. Your job is to find the one that was waiting for you.

Two young boys did the heavy lifting. They pulled rugs from the stacks, carried them across the courtyard and flung them open at our feet, one after another, hundreds of them, then folded each away again without complaint.

One, Musti told us, is his cousin’s son. His cousin had come to him asking a favour: give the boy a job, teach him what hard work looks like. He’d been spending too much of his life on screens, lost to gaming. So here he was, among the wool and the dust, learning the trade one rug at a time.

It stayed with me. I had travelled halfway around the world to a place that could hardly feel more different from the Southern Highlands, and here was a worry any parent at home would recognise instantly. The settings change. The languages, the food, the call to prayer drifting over the rooftops. But so many of life’s problems turn out to be the same everywhere, and so, it seems, are the oldest solutions.

I sat with Musti for most of an afternoon. A coffee became a tea, and the tea became an orange juice, and the light moved across the courtyard while we talked.

He spoke about the women who weave these rugs, and how, for them, the work is treated as a prayer. Not a metaphor for one. A practice of devotion, carried out knot by knot, over weeks and months. It changes how you look at the stacks around you. Each folded rug is someone’s time, attention, and intention, made visible.

Inevitably, we talked about the world beyond the courtyard. About how few hands still make things. About crafts that once passed easily from one generation to the next and now risk passing to no one. About machines that are learning to make nearly everything else, faster and cheaper, and what might be lost if we let them make this too.

There were no tidy answers. But sitting among thousands of rugs that no machine could have made, watching a boy learn to handle them, it was hard not to feel that the answer, if there is one, looks something like this room. Someone who has spent years gathering, keeping, and understanding the work. Someone young enough to carry it forward. And people willing to cross the world to see it, sit down, and listen.

This is why I travel the way I do. Not to place orders, but to spend the afternoon. To meet the people behind the objects, and to bring back pieces that carry their stories with them.

A selection of Musti’s rugs is already with us at The Leopard, and more are on their way. Each one is the only one of its kind. And if none of them is quite yours, we can help you find it among the thousands still waiting in that courtyard in Marrakech.