For centuries, domestic architecture throughout the Gulf has been organized around the courtyard. Houses presented thick exterior walls and limited openings to the street, turning inward toward a shaded garden that structured everyday life. This spatial arrangement responded to both climate and culture. The courtyard brought daylight into deep plans, enabled cross-ventilation, and provided a protected outdoor environment within dense urban fabrics. In the House with Seven Gardens, in Diyar Al Muharraq, Bahrain, the Bahrain-based practice Civil Architecture, one of the winners of the ArchDaily 2025 Next Practices Awards, revisits this spatial tradition through the conditions of contemporary suburban housing. Rather than reproducing the courtyard house as a historical model, the project reinterprets its environmental logic within the regulatory frameworks and spatial conditions that shape much of today's urban development in the Gulf.
The project begins from a situation that has become familiar across many cities in the region. Large areas of contemporary housing are organized as suburban developments composed of detached villas. Unlike the compact urban quarters where traditional courtyard houses once emerged, these new neighborhoods are characterized by separated plots surrounded by mandatory setbacks. Each house stands apart from its neighbors, enclosed within its own parcel of land. While these regulations are intended to ensure privacy, access to daylight, and ventilation, they also create a particular spatial condition: the emergence of narrow strips of land surrounding each building that often remain unused or underutilized.
