Most plots I have designed for offer nothing worth looking at. A neighbor's wall three meters away. A street. Another villa's window, placed with perfect symmetry directly across from where the client wanted his.

So before any conversation about style, a house in Saudi Arabia begins with a problem of geometry: the view does not exist. If the house is going to look at something, the architect has to build that something first.

When architects here are asked why they design courtyards, two answers come back on autopilot. The first is heritage — the courtyard as a bow to the old houses of Najd and Qatif, tradition faithfully continued. The second is climate — the courtyard as a passive cooling machine, complete with diagram arrows showing hot air escaping upward.

Both contain some truth. Neither is why I keep drawing them.

On the Gulf coast, where I work, the cooling argument mostly does not survive August. Humidity blunts what a courtyard can do. A shaded court is more pleasant than an exposed street — but it will not condition your house, and pretending otherwise is romance dressed as engineering. And heritage, on its own, explains nothing. It tells you where the form came from, not why it keeps re-emerging in houses that look nothing like their ancestors.

The real answer is a contradiction that sits inside almost every brief I receive.

The family wants light. Glass, garden, openness — they have seen the same houses online that you have. And the same family needs privacy. Real privacy: from the street, from the neighbors, between guests and household, sometimes between wings of the household itself.

On a typical plot, these two demands destroy each other. Glaze the façade and the curtains close on day one and never open again — and a window that is permanently covered is just a wall that cost more. Protect the façade instead, and the rooms go dim while the garden becomes a strip of leftover setback that no one ever uses.

The courtyard is the only move I know that resolves this cleanly. Turn the house inward and the equation flips. The street façade can be calm, closed, almost silent. And the interior can be more open than any street-facing house would dare — full-height glass, rooms that borrow each other's light — because everything faces a landscape you control. The same house becomes, at the same time, the most private and the most open version of itself.

That is why the courtyard. Not memory. Not airflow. Resolution.

The old courtyard house was a closed ring: rooms on four sides, sky in the middle. That form rarely survives contact with the modern Saudi plot. Setbacks eat the perimeter. Parking claims a corner. Room counts have doubled since our grandfathers built theirs.

So most of my courtyard houses are not rings. They are U's.

The U is the courtyard renegotiated with the modern plot. Three sides held, one side released — to the garden, to the north light, to the single orientation actually worth opening. And the U carries the social logic of the Saudi house almost by itself. The majlis takes one wing, so guests arrive, are received, and leave without ever crossing the family's territory. Family living holds the base. Bedrooms take the other wing. Circulation runs along the court and receives daylight, instead of becoming the dark corridor that connects most villas. Across the void, a parent in the kitchen can see a child in the garden without a single hallway between them.

A plan like this needs no explanation when you stand inside it. That is usually how I know it is correct.

There is also what the courtyard does to light, which no render fully captures. Light that enters from a court is reflected light — bounced off pale walls and paving before it reaches the room, softened, shifting through the day. Rooms can be lit from two sides. And the court gives the house a piece of sky it owns. The few days a year it rains here, it rains inside the plan — and everyone comes to watch.

I design from the inside out: from how a family actually lives, who visits them, who they need distance from, where the light should fall at four in the afternoon. When you begin there — on this land, for these families — the courtyard is rarely something you impose on a plan.

It is what the plan keeps asking for.