Behind the Facade: What It Takes to Renovate an Old Casablanca Apartment

Open any interiors feed and the same apartment keeps appearing: three and a half metre ceilings, original cement tiles in faded ochre and grey, a plaster cornice running the length of the room, tall shutters throwing stripes of light across a bare wall. Almost always it is a flat in one of Casablanca's older districts, Gauthier or Maarif or the blocks off Boulevard Mohammed V, and the styling is impeccable. Two mid-century chairs, a linen curtain, a dwarf olive in a terracotta pot.

What the photograph never shows is what the owner spent eight months dealing with first. A consumer unit with no earthing worth the name. Cast iron drainage stacks shared with five other apartments and cracked somewhere on the third floor. A bathroom ventilated only by a door left ajar. Hollow pot floors that sound alarming when you remove a partition, because nobody kept the original plans. The romance of the finished room rests entirely on work that is invisible, expensive, and impossible to add later without starting again.

This is exactly why premium home improvement in Morocco now begins with a survey rather than a mood board, and why owners increasingly appoint one contractor such as [Business Name] before they choose a single tile. Sequence is the whole game. Get it wrong and the beautiful part is the part you demolish.

The Building Stock Nobody Explains to Buyers

Casablanca grew faster between 1920 and 1950 than almost any city on the continent, and it left behind an enormous inventory of reinforced concrete apartment blocks in Art Deco, Mauresque and early modernist styles. The architecture of Casablanca from that period is now studied internationally, and a good deal of it is still lived in every day, largely unmodernised.

Those buildings share a recognisable set of traits. Slender concrete frames with generous spans. Floors built as hollow clay pots between concrete ribs, which are light and quiet but unforgiving if you chase a channel in the wrong direction. Partitions a single brick thick. Original glazing in steel or slim timber sections. Plumbing and electrics that have been extended, patched and rerouted by four generations of occupants, usually without a drawing. None of that is a reason to avoid these apartments. It is a reason to know what you have bought before you commission anything.

The Order of Operations

Survey before budget

A serious renovation opens with investigation: opening up a small area of floor and wall, testing the electrical installation, camera inspecting the drains, checking the terrace and the light well for water ingress, and confirming which walls are doing structural work. Two days of investigation routinely change a budget by twenty or thirty percent, which is uncomfortable but far better than discovering it in month four.

Services before surfaces

Then the order is close to fixed. Structural alterations and openings first, with an engineer's note. Then drainage and water supply, including the connection into the communal stack, which is the single most common source of disputes with neighbours. Then electrics: a properly sized board with differential protection, real earthing, and enough circuits that nobody is running a washing machine off a lighting spur. Then ventilation, especially for interior bathrooms and kitchens. Only after all of that comes plaster, joinery, tiling and paint, and only after those comes anything you would call decoration.

Paperwork, Syndic and the Neighbours

In a co-owned building, the syndic controls more than people expect: working hours, use of the lift, protection of the common stairwell, and where a skip may stand on a street that was never designed for one. Anything touching the facade, the balconies or the structure moves into a different category again. Interventions on external appearance or on load bearing elements generally require authorisation from the municipality, coordinated through the Agence Urbaine de Casablanca, and the broader framework for urban planning and housing sits with the ministry responsible for housing and city policy.

Budget real time for this. Approvals, syndic agreement and access arrangements regularly take longer than the demolition and first fix combined, and a contractor who tells you otherwise has either done the paperwork already or is planning to skip it.

What to Keep and What to Replace

The judgement that separates a good renovation from an expensive one is knowing what is worth saving. Original cement tiles are almost always worth it: lift them carefully, clean, reseal, and accept that you will need a few replacements from one of the workshops still producing them by hand. Solid timber interior doors, plaster mouldings, terrazzo landings and wrought iron balustrades are in the same category. Replacing them with new equivalents costs more and gives you less.

Windows are usually the opposite case. Original steel frames look wonderful and perform terribly, and on a boulevard the acoustic gain from a good replacement changes how the apartment feels at seven in the morning. The honest compromise is to match the original sight lines and proportions rather than fitting the cheapest wide profile available, then to put the saved energy budget into roof and terrace insulation where it does the most work.

Keep every intervention as reversible as you reasonably can, document what you did, and photograph the services before they disappear behind plaster. Do that and the decorative layer, the cement tiles and the cornices and the tall shutters, stops being a costume. It becomes the visible part of a building that will still be worth photographing in thirty years.