Saffron is not a decoration

A stranger to Morocco thinks the country is loud with colour. They see the dyed skeins drying over the tanneries, the cobalt of a door, the blood-red of a wall at dusk, and they assume abundance — that here, colour is simply thrown.

Spend a season here and you learn the opposite. Saffron is the most expensive spice on earth because each thread is a single stigma, lifted by hand from a flower that blooms for a week. The people who grow it do not scatter it. They count it.

Colour is not what you add. It is what you are willing to spend.

The house works the same way. A piece may be built almost entirely from muted, sun-worn cloth — greys and clays and the brown of old wool — held for a single, unrepeatable note of magenta, or a seam of that impossible saffron, placed exactly where the eye will rest. One coin, spent well, buys more than a fistful thrown.

This is what Morocco teaches, if you let it: that restraint and abundance are not opposites. The most abundant thing in the room is the one colour that had the discipline to arrive alone.

So when a piece of ours burns, understand that it is not decorated. It has been paid for — in every quiet tone that agreed to stand back and let it.