Red, White and Blue

The Martha Stewart paint collection alone must have 50 different shades of white, from summer linen to antique parchment. Factor in the white offerings from Ralph Lauren, Farrow & Ball, Benjamin Moore and others and you’d have the Rose City looking like Casablanca pretty quickly. Color choice, and lots of it, is something to which we’ve grown very accustomed.

Since the painters start at the house today – though what exactly they’re going to do is a mystery since we haven’t a single room finished enough to entertain a coat of paint – we trekked off to the paint store yesterday to stock up on supplies. As we’ve done for the other work projects, we bid out the labor for the paint job and are buying all of the supplies ourselves to ensure quality and a better price. Unlike trips to pick up sheet metal and various types of cement, we feel like we know our way around a paint store and are looking forward to weighing swatches and color options. Comfortable territory at last. When we arrive, we jockey for position in line at the storefront. This is no palace of paint like you’d find at Home Depot; no, the store is more like a musty corner bodega with employees scuttling to retrieve items for customers from the shelves in the shop’s dark depths.

Hamoud hands our list to the shop owner and we wait expectantly for the forthcoming color wheel. What we get is a piece of laminated paper with color tabs divided into two finish groups: peintures brilliantes, or “glossy” and peinture mates. No eggshell, no semi-gloss. There is a subcategory for façade colors, which is basically a study in rose: Rose Mamounia; Saumon; Rouge Marrakech; Rose Chtouka; Rouge Brique, and so on. I catch Samuel eyeing these shades longingly, despite the fact that our home has no exterior walls to be painted. Evidently, when a budding, 12-year-old aesthete, he’d begged his parents to paint his room “dusty rose,” a color he associated with the heights of sophistication. Saving him from sure skewering during birthday party sleep-overs, his sage parents steered him to a mocha color instead. He’s clearly not over his rose fixation.

“But we don’t want glossy or matte,” we say to Hamoud, “we want the walls to be semi-gloss.” “Don’t worry,” he replies, “we just mix the shiny and the flat,” he continues, miming the mélange. Seems plausible, I guess. But what about the colors? We see just one red in the gloss section and one in the matte category. And there isn’t a single white on the page. Not one. “Red is red, and white is white,” says the shop owner when we inquire, the dawning realization of our paucity of choice making us momentarily faint. “But how, but how, but how . . .” we stammer. Surely all of Marrakech is not painted in just Rouge 700 and Rouge 704. Where are the other 699 shades of red? The chart we’ve been given has just 36 colors total; like we said before, Martha’s whites collection tops this number easy.

Unfortunately, this tale does not have a clear conclusion. We left the store with 400 kilograms of paint, mostly white, some black and a half-gallon each of the two reds on offer. Over the next few days, I guess we’ll have to channel our inner Ralph Lauren and come up with some passable versions of Tuxedo White and Dressage Red. We’ll let you be the judge of our mix-master success with forthcoming photos.

It seems that yesterday was destined to be a day of color quandaries. Our bejmat tiles arrived for our bathroom floors. We’re doing a white and black basket-weave pattern. Bejmat is the term for terra cotta tiles that are glazed and fired. Because the glazes are mixed and painted on by hand, there’s always a good deal of variation in the color. Our white batch, unfortunately, could only be described as khaki. A nice color, but not what we’re going for. The problem is that the tiles are made to order and come from Fez. To have a new batch made and shipped would take at least a week and our contractor is ready to lay the tiles this week. Given that our first guests arrive in just two weeks and with Ramadan looming, we’re loathe to invite a delay like this.

Sure, a house project is all about compromises and creative solutions, but some things are non-negotiable. Yesterday, on his birthday, and with king-for-a-day attitude, Samuel threw down the gauntlet: We find white bejmat tiles today or, or, or . . . else! Hamoud shook his head at us – he hates it when voices get raised or when we seem stressed out about anything -but his good nature and resourcefulness soon had us all in a better mood as we set off on a journey to find pure white bejmat, one that took us first to the industrial zone and then to a factory 20 kilometers outside of Marrakech on the road to Essaouira.

We have varying degrees of luck when we decide to stick to our guns about something, but yesterday it paid off. While we can’t be sure what color red our dining room will end up, we’re damn certain the bathroom floors will be a pristine Vermont Snow White.