Why standard packing is not enough
A packing method designed for mass-produced furniture assumes uniform materials, machine tolerances and a degree of forgiveness. Moroccan craft has none of those. It is hand-made, often irregular, frequently a composite of materials that expand and contract at different rates.
Add the change of climate at the other end — a piece made in dry heat arriving into damp cold — and you have the two forces that actually break things in transit: vibration and humidity change. Everything below is about one or the other.
Zellige and mosaic tabletops
A zellige tabletop is hundreds of hand-cut tiles set into plaster or cement. It is rigid, heavy, and completely unforgiving of flex. The failure mode is not a dropped table; it is a top that was allowed to bend slightly across its span while the truck vibrated for a thousand kilometres.
It travels flat, fully supported across its whole surface, never on edge and never with weight on top. Where a top can be separated from its base, it should be, and each part crated on its own.
Lanterns and pierced metalwork
Lanterns are the most deceptive item in the house. They look robust, they weigh very little, and they are mostly air held together by thin pierced brass or iron with glass panels set into it.
They crush. Packing them together in one box, however well padded on the outside, means they crush each other. Each lantern needs its interior volume supported so the frame cannot fold inward, glass panels protected individually, and no other object stacked above it.
Rugs and textiles
A good rug is one of the few things in a container that gains value by being taken abroad, and it is also one of the easiest to ruin quietly.
Roll, never fold. A fold becomes a permanent crease and, on a heavier weave, a broken line in the pile. Roll with the pile facing outward, around a tube rather than on itself, and protect against both moisture and insects — natural wool crossing a sea is a genuine target for moths.
The temptation is to wrap a rug tightly in plastic. Do not. Sealed plastic traps moisture against the fibres for weeks, and what comes out at the other end is a rug with a smell that does not leave.
Pottery, tagines and tadelakt
Hand-thrown pottery has irregular walls, which means it has weak points a factory piece would not. Tagines are worse than they look because the lid and base grind against each other in transit and chip both.
Separate every lid from its base and wrap them individually. Pack pottery on its base, never on its side, and never let two glazed surfaces touch. Tadelakt and plasterwork chip at the edges rather than break in the middle, so the protection needs to be concentrated at the corners.
Inlaid and carved wood
Thuya wood boxes, marquetry, carved cedar screens and inlaid tables are composites: several woods, sometimes bone or metal, held together with glue and set in a dry climate.
Take them to a damp climate and the components move at different rates. That is what lifts an inlay or opens a seam, and it happens after arrival rather than during the journey. A moisture barrier in the packing helps, and so does a slow acclimatisation at the other end: unpack, then leave the piece in the room for a while before putting it near a radiator.
Describe it properly on the inventory
None of this is exotic from a customs point of view. Rugs, lanterns and pottery are ordinary personal effects and travel as such.
What matters is that they are described accurately and valued sensibly on the inventory. "Carpet" invites a question; "hand-knotted wool rug, 2×3m" does not. Keep receipts where you have them, particularly for anything genuinely valuable, and photograph pieces before they are wrapped. That photograph is also what an insurance claim rests on if anything does go wrong.