What's it like to shop for and buy a Moroccan rug?

It begins the moment you so much as glance at a doorway hung with carpets. A hand is on your arm, gently, and you're swept into a cool, dim room stacked floor to ceiling with rolled rugs, and before you can say you're just looking you're sitting on a low bench with a glass of mint tea steaming in your hand. This, you quickly realise, is not a shop you browse. It's a performance staged for an audience of one, and you've just been cast as the buyer.

Then the unrolling starts, and it's genuinely beautiful. Two young men haul carpet after carpet from the towering piles and snap them open across the floor with a practised flick, building a soft, overlapping landscape of colour at your feet — deep madder reds, indigo, a cream Beni Ourain dense with charcoal lines, an old Boucherouite stitched from rag. The dealer crouches beside each one and tells you its life: which village wove it, what the diamonds and zigzags mean, that this one took a woman four months on a loom in the Middle Atlas. Whether every word is true matters less than the spell it casts.

The haggling, when it comes, is its own slow dance and you should not fear it. The first price is theatre and you both know it; you smile, name something well below it, and the two of you trade numbers and feigned heartbreak back and forth, more tea arriving to keep you in the chair. Be patient and good-humoured, decide your real ceiling before you start, and be genuinely willing to stand up and walk — that single move does more than any clever counter-offer. A fair final price often lands somewhere near half the opening one, sometimes less.

What you carry out, rolled and tied with twine over your shoulder, is more than a rug. It's the memory of an hour spent being courted, fed, and gently worked over by a master salesman in a room that smelled of wool and mint, the floor a riot of colour, your resolve tested and your curiosity rewarded. Yes, you might have paid a touch over the odds; no Moroccan will ever tell you you got the very best price. But you'll unroll it at home, see that village loom, and know exactly what you brought back.