The instinct, when you take on a building like Riad Bab Haha, is to imagine an end state and work backwards toward it. The Direction du Patrimoine teaches you, gently and then less gently, that this is the wrong way around. With a listed building, you begin by understanding what is there and what is missing; what is original and what was added at some point in the long, anonymous history of a house that has been continuously occupied for two and a half centuries.
Our brief was to make the building liveable as a single residence again, without removing anything that was either original or of interest. In practice that meant restoring three courtyards, the basement hammam, and the roof terrace; replacing a 1970s concrete slab that had been poured over the principal salon; and re-laying about four hundred square metres of bejmat and zellige using local craftsmen working in the way the building was first made.
The two questions we got most often during the project were about authenticity and about plumbing. The authenticity question has an honest answer: no restoration is neutral. You are always choosing which moment in the life of the building to privilege. The plumbing answer is that it is entirely possible to put modern bathrooms into a listed riad — quietly, and behind the walls — and it is the single most expensive part of the work.
Three years on, the house is occupied by its new owners. The most successful part of the restoration is the one we are least responsible for: the original tadelakt of the principal courtyard, polished by hand again by an atelier in Fez, that catches the morning light off the orange tree at the centre of the patio.
