Challenge
The plot sits on an open street in Al-Qatif, where sun, heat, and proximity leave little room for privacy or quiet. A conventional villa would face outward and spend its best rooms defending against all three. The brief was a family house that felt open and generous without surrendering itself to the road.

Concept
Turn the house inward. The plan folds into a U — three wings wrapping a single private courtyard — so the life of the house faces a garden it makes for itself rather than the street. To the road, the house presents a calm, near-closed wall. Behind it, every room opens onto a shaded court and an olive tree at its centre. It is the oldest logic in the region, the courtyard house, drawn in clean contemporary lines.

Key moves
The U-plan wraps the court on three sides; the fourth opens to the garden's depth, giving the ground floor a long inward view. A continuous sand-toned wall gives the street a quiet, private frontage, with openings kept few and screened. Inside, every primary room turns toward the court — the house is organized around the void, not a facade. A single olive tree anchors that court, the heart the plan was built to hold. Timber battens and a perforated screen panel temper the sun and filter sightlines, a modern reading of the regional mashrabiya. The palette is deliberately short: warm sand stucco, natural timber, one screen motif, glass.