We live in the countryside of Morocco, outside of the coastal city of Essaouira, where my husband Aziz and I moved three years ago to launch Mid Century Maroc, our online ‘souk’ of mid-century furnishings found in Morocco.

Creating our home has been a labor of love. We bought it on a whim while on our honeymoon four years ago. It was broken down, no electricity, no water, with large animal feces scattered throughout. Abandoned for 15 years, our property and home were likely a good destination for local herders who could let their animals graze in a contained space with no one to bother them.

Four years, countless workers and four renovation projects later, we are settled. This means the decorating, the details, can begin. My favorite part of nesting for sure.

Tile layers, 2019, photo by Proimmobilier Essaouira

Our house is very much an ‘inside/outside’ house. Typical of many homes in the Middle East and North Africa, we have an inner courtyard open to the sky with a fountain and plantings. The heart of the home, all rooms lead off of the courtyard so the inhabitant is constantly traversing ‘outside’ while inside the house. In Islamic teachings, guidelines exist for domestic life that focus on relationships, personal health and the environment, to name a few. Additionally, hospitality and privacy are two essential aspects of domestic life in Islam. The inner courtyard fits neatly into these teachings as it offers a private space for the family to enjoy nature and welcome guests.

Inner courtyard with fountain, 2020, photo @tigo.sanchez

Complementing our courtyard life, our home is surrounded by countryside with a few homes scattered here and there. The landscape feels like a mix between the Sonoran Desertand the dunes and piney forests of Northern Michigan, two places I know well. So I feel at home. I wander alone with ease, always mindful of real dangers.

People living in the Moroccan countryside have animals. And not as pets but for revenue, labor and food. Life is harsh here for the rural poor. Where there is an abundance of sunshine and fresh air, there is a glaring lack of opportunity. So people have animals. Camels for milk, donkeys for labor and transport, sheep, cows and goat for meat, milk or for sale, chickens and roosters for eggs, and dogs for herding and protection.

When we moved here, I began folding in daily walks with our dogs. No two walks are the same. Sometimes we run into a herder with his or her animals, sometimes lone camels munching in their slow and beguiling way, blinking their dreamy long eyelashes all the while. And then there are the packs of stray dogs.

Whereas animal sightings differ on each walk, the sighting of dried in the sun bones does not. All the beasts mentioned earlier eventually die and that happens outside, naturally.

Bones are everywhere and usually presented in full carcass. Everything is there; the skull, the ribs, the femur, etc. I picked up my first bone, a goat jaw bone to be exact, around a year ago. I couldn’t resist. Bleached, bright, smooth and sculptural I decided to bring it home. I guess I was channeling my inner Georgia O’Keeffe, a 20th century American modernist painter often called the “Mother of American modernism”.

O’Keeffe painted skyscrapers, flowers and bones. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico with her husband, renown photographer Alfred Stieglitz in the late 1920s, she became a bone collector. Bones not only showed up in her work but she arranged them throughout her home.

Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1931

With my collection steadily growing, I began to place them around the house and patio as well.

I learned through Aziz that dried bones are not everyones favorite object to live with. This especially became clear when he objected to a cow skull I had perched on our kitchen table. I didn’t think twice about having this gorgeous piece of art right there as we tucked in to countless delicious meals. But he found it unsettling, and frankly unclean, so the skull went to the courtyard (a compromise).

That got me thinking. What constitutes a good bone to live with vs a bad bone?

Months earlier, during round four of renovations, some of the workers noticed my collection. I can only imagine what they thought. She must be crazy. She’s a witch. This is haram (forbidden, in Islam). But one day they arrived and as a group passed over a bundle to me saying, ‘cadeau’ (present, in French). Touched and surprised, I opened it and viola, they brought me a goat skull! I shrieked, we laughed, they joked amongst themselves, and I turned my new skull around and around in my hand to examine my new addition.

What I realized very fast is this goat skull was not the most attractive one I’ve seen. The flesh was clearly off, no signs of hair or bad smells. But it wasn’t gleaming white. In fact, it had a brown tinge to it which just made it look sketchy, as in a public health threat. After my examination, I placed said skull on top of the wall surrounding our patio. And there she will stay. She qualifies as an ‘outside’ skull, not the kind of skull you bring home to mama.

The very next day, I was bequeathed with a cow skull! Again, shrieks, laughter, jokes I am sure at my expense or that of the gift giver. Like the goat, this skull was also mangy looking, so the two share an outside perch in eternity.

The ‘inside’ bone is easy to find. I see them every day. They gleam from a distance, alone in the sand waiting to be picked up. They are clean and bright and the perfect shape.

Our inside bone collection rotates frequently. When the mood strikes we’ll swap a vertebra for a femur and see how that suits. We also use them in photo shoots for our business which we hope adds a little local flavor. As our bone collection grows so will our decor ideas on how to bring the outside in. In the meantime, I’ll keep hunting.

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Welcome to the Mid Century Maroc family.

Aziz & Brooke