.htaccess woes – cant access wp-admin

Hello, I am having some issues with .htaccess rewrites and basic auth.

My WordPress is installed in the wordpress folder. However, I access it through the root of the domain as described here. At this point everything works. However, if I add a .htaccess basic auth to the wp-admin folder I can no longer access it. Instead, I get WP’s 404.

Is there a way to exclude that folder specifically from the rewrite rule? I’ve been googling on this for a while now and nothing that came up worked.

Here is the .htaccess from the root:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wordpress/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /wordpress/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

And here the .htaccess from wp-admin:

AuthName "Restricted Area"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /path/blah/blah
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
require user xxx

Any suggestions? If I remove the wp-admin .htaccess everything works fine, but as soon as I add it back in it stops working.