How Zellige Is Made, Stage by Stage

August 9, 2026

Zellige workshop in Salé, Morocco, with a star-shaped basin and wall fountains in progress

Zellige looks like it was drawn with instruments. Every star closes perfectly, every border runs true, and the pieces meet so tightly that the pattern reads as one surface. Then you learn that not a single piece was cut by a machine, and that the artisan who cut them was working from the back of the tile, unable to see the face he was shaping.

Here is how a zellige surface actually comes together, stage by stage, and the names the craft gives to its own tools and shapes.

The word

Zellige, Zellij, Zilij

You will see the word spelled zellige, zellij and zilij. They are the same craft, transliterated from Arabic in different ways: zellige follows French spelling, zellij follows English. In the workshop, a single glazed tile is a zelliza. Everything below starts with one of those.

The vocabulary in this article was recorded among the master tilers of Fez, the city most associated with the craft. Our own tables are made in Salé, on the Atlantic coast, where the same tradition has been passed down through families.

The process

Six Stages, Six Pairs of Hands

Zellige is not made by one person. It moves through a workshop, and each stage has its own specialist with his own name.

The clay · maalem fekhkhar

The potter works grey clay into thin square tiles by hand, dries them in the sun, then fires them. What comes out of the kiln is a plain terracotta blank. No pattern yet, no colour, just the raw material the whole craft is built on.

The glaze · tellay

The glazer coats one face of each blank and fires it a second time. The glaze vitrifies into the deep, slightly uneven colour that makes zellige recognisable at a glance. Because each batch is mixed and fired separately, no two firings give exactly the same shade, which is why a finished top carries small variations across tiles of the same colour.

The tracing · rsim

The marker, the ressam, draws the cutting lines onto the unglazed back of the tile, guided by a template piece called a ferma. The geometry is set here. A design is not sketched onto the finished surface later: it exists first as lines on the reverse of tiles that have not yet been cut.

The cutting · kessar

This is the heart of it. The cutter works with a menqach, an iron hammer sharpened on both edges, set into a handle of apricot wood. He rests the tile against a menjra, a brick support, and strikes the glazed piece from the back, chipping away at the line until the shape releases. The blade dulls constantly and is brought back on a rha, a sharpening stone, throughout the day. A second artisan, the khellas, bevels the edges so the pieces will sit tight against each other.

The laying · fargh

The ferragh assembles the pattern face down, glaze against the workbench, working from the geometry alone. He is building the design in mirror image and cannot see the surface he is composing until it is finished and turned over.

The setting · ghabbar

With the pieces face down and locked in position, plaster or cement is powdered over the exposed backs to bind them into a single panel. Once it cures, the whole surface is lifted and turned. That is the first time anyone sees the finished face.

Emerald fishscale zellige tabletop, glossy from the kiln

An emerald fishscale top, still glossy from the kiln

Vocabulary

The Names of the Shapes

A workshop does not talk about triangles and hexagons. It has its own names for the cut pieces, some geometric, some borrowed from everyday things.

khatem

a star-shaped form

mrabbaa

a square

drihem

a lozenge, a diamond

louz

literally almond

mchita

literally little comb

arja

literally the limping one

cherrafa

a braided form, used along crenellated friezes

bejmat

the long 15 by 5 briquette

If a few of those sound familiar, that is deliberate. Louz, one of the designs in our collection, takes its name straight from the almond-shaped cut.

Geometry

Stars Counted by Their Branches

The large star rosettes are not named by how they look but by how many branches they carry. The bigger the number, the more pieces converge on a single centre, and the more work the design demands.

24

rebaa w achrini
48

khemsini
48

khemsini ayn ech-chams · eye of the sun
68

sebaini
96

miaini

Our tables

Where We Do It Differently

Our tabletops go through every stage above, right down to what the pieces are set into at the very end.

Set in cement, made to last

Traditional zellige is set into a bed of cement or plaster, which is what you want on a wall or a floor that never moves. Our tabletops stay with cement, every size, every design. A table lives by a window or out on a terrace, and full sun is where cement earns its keep: resin, the common modern shortcut, can soften and bow a little as the sun works on it over the years, where cement holds the surface flat for good. The trade is weight. A cement top makes a heavier table, and we take that trade gladly: the weight is part of why a Zellij table feels so planted wherever you put it.

Why yours will not match the photo exactly

Now that you know the glaze is fired in small batches and every piece is struck by hand, the small differences make sense. Tones shift a little between firings, neighbouring tiles of one colour vary, and grout lines are never machine-straight. On smaller diameters the artisan concentrates the pattern on its centre, because a fine outer border cannot be cut true below a certain size.

Thirty finished handmade zellige mosaic table tops in the workshop in Salé, Morocco

Thirty finished tops in Salé, waiting to be wrapped

The collection

Made This Way, For You

Each of these was photographed in the workshop in Salé on the day it was finished, before it was wrapped for the journey.

Menta

Halwa

Sala

Made in Salé, to order, for you

Every table in our Zellij Tables collection goes through all six stages after your order is placed. Allow 2 to 4 weeks for it to be made in Salé, then 1 to 2 weeks for delivery, so roughly 3 to 6 weeks from order to your door. Diameters run from 20 to 90 cm and beyond, heights are yours to choose, and the tabletop can be ordered on its own. See how custom orders work, or message us on WhatsApp. Read next: how to style a zellige table in your home.