Moroccan-Inspired Front Steps

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, is one amazing place, so it's no surprise that we made visiting there a priority when we went to Spain a few years ago. It is chock full of spectacular Moorish architectural embellishments and design that are visually spellbinding. The Moorish influences around southern Spain were so extraordinary, they inspired a visit to Morocco the following year. Needless to say, we were dazzled.

One of a million examples of plaster work at the Alhambra.

From the Alcazar in Seville, to a variety of stops in the underbelly of Fes, the remnants of old Moorish design are ever-present in this region. There are intricate tile designs known as zellij that are usually found on walls, but will also make up floors, ceilings, fountains, and more. Carved plaster designs grace archways and columns and walls. Pretty much any surface that a Moroccan craftsperson sees as under-served in the beauty department will get the full treatment. If there are unadorned surfaces anywhere, well, it must be because somebody just hasn't gotten around to it yet.

Floor somewhere in Morocco.

Doorway in a tight alley in Fes.

The Alcazar in Seville, Spain.

Meknes, a short train ride from Fes, also has a great deal of this type of artistry on display throughout the city.

A bonus shot from Meknes featuring the Moroccan triple threat: superb zellij tile work, plaster work, and calligraphy.

A wall in a madrasa in Meknes. Imagine showing me a pic of your trip to the mountains and trying to explain how a photograph doesn't capture the feeling of being there. That's how I feel here, that no photo can do these places justice. 

Rabat, the capital city of Morocco, of course is not going to be outdone in the presentation department, and went all out at the more modern Mausoleum of Mohammed V.

How about some more fountains?

El Glaoui Palace in Fes.

In a museum in Fes - I think Dar Batha, but I'm not entirely sure at the moment.

After reflecting on all that we'd seen on these two trips, we knew that we wanted to incorporate this kind of design into our home somehow. I even toyed with the idea of putting a fountain in our patio, but of course, our climate would not be kind to any intricate tile work or outdoor plumbing. But when our front steps needed redoing this summer, before the mail carrier fell through one of these days, I thought aha! Now's my chance. I sketched out a few ideas, showed them to my supervisor, and got down to work.

Staring at the doors of the Fes Royal Palace, ideas began to stir.

I knew right from the start though that there was no way I was doing tile work outdoors (or anywhere for that matter), and that I needed to curb my enthusiasm as I had no time (or skills) to recreate the Alhambra in my yard, so calm down right now if you think that's what this post is about.

I started searching out some ideas on the web, coming across a couple pics with designs that I could base my stair design on. It wasn't until preparing this post that I realized the photo I was using was of a door that I had taken a picture of. Looking back, I'm not sure how I ended up searching the web instead of my own photos. I think I must have been doing both, but anyways. Here's the pic that made me go, "Ah, that I can work with."

My photo of a door at the Alhambra.

A close up of another area to show how the aged tiles can look.

I actually started to draw the design out on the first riser before quickly realizing that a stencil would be much easier overall. I did this on some matte board, which is heavy enough to take some abuse and can be saved for future work.

The diamond pattern stencil was about a third of the length of the steps. I just sketched out the first third, moved the stencil, and repeated.

It's probably not worth noting that we went a good two weeks without front steps while I laboured over the design and rebuild. I tore the old steps out, then started to think about how I would do the design. Which is maybe a good thing as you don't want to spend a lot of your life creating something fabulous only to realize later that it doesn't fit into your stairs.

Once the design was sketched out on the primed riser boards, I got to work on the painting. I thought I had carefully chosen my paint colours, but apparently not, so I had to do some mixing to get my green colour the way I wanted it. 

Hard at work on the patio during those 35 degree days in July. The light of the sun looks like it's turning the patio blocks red hot. Supervisor took this pic from the comfort of her new day bed (completed during the hot days of June) which is wonderfully shaded on those hot, hot days.

With the design in place, it's just a matter of filling in the colours, and then deciding how far you want to take the trompe l'oeil effect to make realistic looking tiles.

On my first board, the top riser, I went all in. I was loving creating this look. When my supervisor got home from her other job, it was noted that we didn't want tiles that looked like they were ready to fall off the stairs today, so I had to tone it down going forward.

You can see in this pic how I mixed some blue in with my green to create a sort of translucent effect, giving the tiles a little more visual interest over a straight green.

I did this with the other colours too. I used a primer that was verging towards cream, but those bright, bold tile colours could not cover in one coat. I swished an uneven second and occasional third coat over top so that some white would still show through here and there.

My dog was an amazing cheerleader through all of this.

Here are a couple pics of the final risers, in place, today. One thing that is clear is that I'm going to have to spend a lot more time cleaning my steps than I ever did before. Every time it rains, the drops splatter dirt all over my nice stairs!

All the tiles look a little imperfectly "cut" so as not to look like wall paper, but emulate real hand-cut tile. The "grout" gets into all the little imperfections and nicks in the tiles, and little shadows are added here and there to give some depth.

I changed up the shades of the tiles a bit so that they are not all uniformly the exact same colour.

The supervisor had a wise idea to add some small red tiles into the mix.

Look at all that dirt on my new stairs!

Here are the completed stairs so you can see the entire design together. One thing I would do differently is make the white "tiles" that accompany the squares of blue, mustard, and green just a hair thinner. Maybe a millimetre or two. Not much, as a little would go a long way here.

Note that I was very careful to include the depth of the stair tread in the design layout. This way it appears that the tread is in front of a continuous wall of tile, which allows the tiles to visually flow from one riser to the next.

Overall, I'm really happy with how they turned out. And now when the supervisor gets home from work on a -35 day in January, she will be warmed by the memories of those wonderful spring days in Spain and Morocco.

Here are my photo galleries from Spain and Morocco.

Buy Spain prints here, and Morocco prints here. 

All Those Books

It has come to the attention of my agents and entourage that my many books and book titles are confusing people. While I enjoy a good practical joke every now and then, it was not my intention to have people buying more books than necessary.

So here is a primer on all the books available from 275Days.

We'll start with the most recent…actually, no, that's probably going to be more confusing and not very helpful. Let's start at the beginning, maybe that will clear things up. The real beginning, for me. For this story, at least.

A bunch of years ago now, we had a super cool opportunity, and out of that, we took some time off to travel around the world with our two kids for nine months. Before we left home, I was thinking about how to keep family and friends informed of what we were doing, and a blog was the best I could come up with. Nine months is pretty close to 275 days, so that's where the name of the blog came from. (Actually, if you subtract our departure day and our return day, we were gone for 275 days.) What I did know was that I would take lots of pictures in lots of cool places, and people would probably be interested in that. This was 2007, so youtubing while travelling was not really a big thing, and I didn't want to be spending the trip videoing everything and then being glued to a computer during all of our down time. 

I won't get into the details of the trip here, but the low down is this:

One month in Italy

Five weeks in Greece

Four weeks in Turkey

About two weeks each in 

Syria

Jordan

Egypt

Eleven weeks in India

And the final two months for a rush job of 

Thailand

Cambodia

Vietnam

and Laos

I started writing before we got to Rome, the first place on our itinerary, and did not let up until we left the airport in Incheon, Korea, on our way back home. 

I ended up with a couple hundred posts, with more than thousand pictures on the blog. That's just a guess. I never actually counted how many pictures I included, but it was a fraction of the twenty thousand I took. And those two hundred-plus posts clocked in at over 150,000 words. Yikes, what a mouthful.

I spent a couple years preparing for an art show in 2010, and then had more time to think about the value of all those words and photos. It seemed a shame to just have it sit on the computer in our house, only to be seen on anniversary dates of being here or there, or when we (I) were feeling particularly nostalgic. But as I reread the blog, two things were clear: there were a lot of great stories lingering in that mass of words, and; it deserved a far better fate than to simply disappear in an electronic recycling depot. A book seemed like the logical answer. After a bit of editing and a lot of designing, I came up with a book so massive that it required two volumes. The online printing service, Blurb, had a page limit and I was well over. At this point, two more things were clear: it would need considerably more editing, and: it was beautiful. This could work.