Seven Courtyards in a Box: What to Consider First in an Inward-Looking Home

M Residence on Serifos, Greece, was designed by MOLD Architects of Athens. The house maintains a strict square outline, with seven open-air courtyards embedded inside; the roof is pierced by irregular openings that reveal planting and shaded passages in the courtyards. The project sits on an exposed slope at Lia, its geometric volume facing arid, rocky hills and the Aegean Sea. What is most worth Shenzhen homeowners' attention in this approach is not the terracotta-colored exterior, but that it moves the question of "where daylight and ventilation come from" from the exterior walls to the interior.^[1]

The project has a fairly long history. Architect Iliana Kerestetzi completed the initial design early in her practice in 2011; it went unbuilt for more than a decade afterward. After new owners revived the scheme, she returned to the original drawings with a different perspective: the core concept was retained, rooms opened more fully toward the courtyards, the material palette grew warmer, and it was completed in 2026. This timeline itself shows one thing: a courtyard layout is not a form settled in a single drawing; the relationship between rooms and courtyards must be checked repeatedly during the design phase, and the later the adjustments, the greater the cost.^[1]

Placing seven courtyards within a square outline means the home's daylight surfaces no longer rely only on exterior walls open on four sides. Roof openings bring light into the interior, courtyards handle ventilation and planting, and curved walls bend around rooms, stringing the seven courtyards into an internal sequence. For homes on compact plots, this offers an idea: when exterior wall openings are limited, part of daily daylight and air exchange can be entrusted to internal courtyards, rather than crowding every room onto the facade.^[1]

But this idea has clear preconditions. For a courtyard to truly work well, several things must be satisfied at once: whether the courtyard's scale and depth let light reach where it is needed, whether the openings help hot air escape, how rainwater is organized for discharge, how waterproofing and threshold height differences between the courtyard floor and adjacent rooms are handled, and whether the courtyard reduces the privacy of adjacent rooms. These are not matters of form, but design conditions to be checked during the design phase together with structural, drainage and equipment conditions. The material does not provide performance data or user feedback for this project, so it cannot be asserted on that basis that courtyards are necessarily more comfortable or more energy-efficient than exterior windows.

For homes in Shenzhen, this approach needs more cautious translation. Shenzhen is rainy with high humidity; if a courtyard's drainage and moisture protection are poorly handled, it easily becomes a source of standing water and mold. In summer the solar altitude is high, so a narrow, deep courtyard may only receive light high up, leaving lower rooms darker instead. If considering introducing a small courtyard or inner courtyard into one's own home, it is advisable to first check three things: whether the rooms the courtyard would serve already lack daylight, whether the opening area is proportional to the depth, and whether the drainage path can be worked out on drawings. Any idea involving openings in floor slabs or changes to load-bearing walls cannot be judged from floor plans or renderings alone; it must be checked against the relevant professional basis.

Another easily overlooked trade-off is privacy. Seven courtyards cut the interior space apart; rooms open windows toward courtyards, and if sightlines connect between courtyards, the privacy relationships between floors and between adjacent rooms must be rearranged. The curved walls here are not merely form; they also serve to screen and guide. For an ordinary home, if only one inner courtyard is made, the same questions apply: from which rooms can this courtyard be seen, and from the courtyard which rooms can be seen, and will nighttime lighting affect the bedroom. These questions are easier to resolve at the plan stage than at the decoration stage.

The square outline and seven courtyards of M Residence are a scheme that takes inwardness to an extreme; its validity depends on a specific climate, plot and owner's lifestyle. For Shenzhen homeowners, the more practical judgment is: does one's own home really need to turn daylight and ventilation inward, or are exterior windows and mechanical ventilation already sufficient. Only having done residential work does one understand living—深圳市熹合空间设计有限公司's position in pure residential design is to first ground a daily need in specific spatial relationships, then decide whether to adopt a certain form; a courtyard, lightwell or inner courtyard is worth bringing into a scheme only when daylight, drainage, privacy and structural conditions can all be clearly explained.

If you are comparing whether to introduce an inner courtyard, you can first do a paper check: list the rooms and time periods you hope the courtyard would serve, mark these rooms' existing sources of daylight and ventilation, then draw the path of rainwater from opening to discharge. If after checking you find the courtyard solves problems for only one or two rooms but brings multiple waterproofing and privacy adjustments, then putting resources back into exterior windows, shading and ventilation organization may be the more prudent choice. This judgment does not require copying any project; it only requires laying out one's own conditions clearly.

It should be noted that the above is a design observation of a completed project and does not constitute a structural, waterproofing or performance conclusion for Shenzhen homes. Specific methods involving openings, demolition and alteration, and drainage systems should be determined after checking against the relevant professional basis. The project's completion date and design attribution come from public reports; its actual performance is not provided in the material, and readers should not infer the living outcomes of their own homes from it.