What are muqarnas / the carved plaster and cedar?

If zellige is the floor and dado, muqarnas, carved plaster and cedar are the ceiling and the heavens above your head. Muqarnas are those mesmerising honeycomb clusters — sometimes called stalactite vaulting — that fill the curve of a dome or the hollow of an archway with dozens of small, nested niches. I always tell people to look up and just let their eyes get lost; the geometry is designed to feel infinite, dissolving the hard edge of a corner into shimmering complexity.

They are built from carved gypsum plaster, known locally as gebs. The artisan works the still-soft plaster with chisels and gouges, cutting lacework so fine it looks impossible, often layering arabesques and Quranic calligraphy into the same panel. In the great madrasas and palaces, bands of this carved plaster sit directly above the tile, so your eye climbs from hard geometric mosaic into soft, deeply undercut white plaster — a deliberate progression from earth toward sky.

Above the plaster comes the cedar. Moroccan cedar from the Middle Atlas is prized for its fragrance and its workability, and master carpenters cover ceilings with it — coffered, painted, gilded, and incised with the same interlacing stars. In older buildings the cedar has darkened with age and incense smoke, and it gives a room that warm, resinous scent that I think of as the smell of historic Fes.

What moves me about this upper realm of decoration is that almost no visitor sees it being made, yet it crowns every important space. When I take clients into a restored madrasa, I have them stand quietly in the centre and read the room from the ground up — tile, plaster, muqarnas, cedar. It is a single composition, an architecture of patience, and it tells you Moroccan craftsmen were also some of the world's great geometers.