Dar Noury

To spoil the punchline, we bought a house today.

OK, let’s back up. The rental houses we looked at here in Marrakech ranged from grim to grimmer. The one exception cost 2000 Euros a month, not counting realtor fees. So, Hamoud made another offer on what we’d been calling Mosque House, and this time the owner accepts.


We go through a little panic as we try to decide how to proceed. We speak with Nathalie, and she brings a structural engineer to look over the place; his approval helps us breath easier. Hamoud brings us a general contractor whom he’d worked with before to give us estimates on all the projects we want to undertake. We’re pointing to a wall we want to knock a hole in when M’hammed, our Muezzin-Immobiliere gets a phone call from a clearly frustrated owner. He’d agreed to our low-ball offer three days ago, and hadn’t heard back.

In seconds we’re piling into Hamoud’s car and driving across town to meet the man, who lives in Casablanca and happens to be passing through Marrakech on his way to the seaside resort of Agadir for the weekend. We sputter to a stop in Hamound’s rattle-trap of a Renault to see Ahmed unfurl himself from the back of a shiny black BMW X5. A luxury SUV in the States, this is literally the first X5 we’ve seen in Morocco where a Honda Accord is considered luxe. Ahmed is very charming and tells us how he runs a large business in Casablanca distributing Botox and Brita water filters throughout Morocco. His business is growing, and he needs the cash tied up in the house to finance it. Our fears that by purchasing an old house in the medina we would be sending a family reluctantly out to live in the Nouvelle Ville vanish as we learn that he bought the place a year ago to be his Marrakech party house but never had the time to fix it up. After a 10-minute chat we shake hands and drive off; it seems we’ve committed to buying the house. As he’s got his weekend in Agadir ahead of him, and needs to collect the papers for the house in Casablanca, we agree to meet Monday morning to sign the Commitment to Buy document at the Notary’s office.





This morning we sit nervously at a café, waiting for the owner to arrive before heading into the bustling office. Three hours, many signatures, and $150 well-spent dollars for a translator later, we all “shake full hands” on the house who’s real name, it turns out is Dar Noury. We’d been told by the translator to wait to shake until all of the papers had been signed so we could do so with “full hands” – ours full of a house and the former owner’s full with money.



Ahmed, it turns out is very gracious, and offers not only to turn over the keys to the house immediately so that we can begin work, rather than waiting for the money to clear the banks, but he also invites us to stay with him in Casablanca and promises to show us the town. As the Botox King of Morocco speeds back up to Casa, we stumble out into the 110-degree heat, giddy about Dar Noury, but savvy enough to know we’re about to become slaves to her.