The Courtyard is an O-shaped design that encloses all four sides of a central courtyard. There are three primary types of Courtyard Houses:

   Country Courtyard Mansions: Historically, many Courtyard designs were attached to adjacent buildings, but Courtyard designs may also stand free in the landscape. Freestanding Courtyards are likely to be Mansions because it takes a lot of square footage to enclose all four sides of a moderately sizeable courtyard. The greatest manor houses in Europe, for example, are typically courtyard houses, fully enclosing one or more courtyards.

   City Courtyard Houses: Full Courtyard Houses in the city are as likely as not to be built adjacent to other buildings in the most urban parts of town. Attached houses in European cities, for example, almost always have an interior courtyard. Because they are attached, urban Courtyard Houses are only one room deep except at the front, where they sometimes are two rooms deep.

   The Three-Quarter Courtyard: There is a third Courtyard sub-type that has recently been popularized at Alys Beach in Florida. This sub-type uses the blank wall of the neighboring house to enclose the fourth side of the courtyard. As a result, this type can be smaller. The images below is from the courtyard of a Mouzon Design home at Alys Beach. We hope to be able to include our Alys Beach homes in this book at a later date. Three-Quarter Courtyards are entered via a covered passage between the house and its neighbor known as a “zaguan.” Depending on where the garage is located, it is possible to have adjacent Three-Quarter Courtyards with no interior finished spaces that adjoin interior spaces in their neighbors’ houses. So you get the efficiency of an attached home (no wasted side yards) with the privacy of freestanding homes. This all depends on the land planner knowing what they’re doing and coding the courtyard locations properly, of course. Buy in a neighborhood designed by a good New Urbanist planner to make sure this happens.