The Court in the Garden

Not every room in a house needs a roof, or a program written in advance.

Somewhere in the planning of every family house, a client asks for a court. A half-court for evening games, room enough for a serve, a flat stretch of concrete that asks nothing of the architecture around it.

It would be easy to treat this as an afterthought: a line item, tucked wherever the lot allows. We don't. A court used well is used constantly: after school, before dinner, on evenings when the light runs long into July. It deserves the same attention as any other room.

So we site it early. Orientation for late light. A wall that returns the ball as well as it holds a view. Enough distance from the principal rooms that a game doesn't compete with a quiet evening indoors, and enough closeness that a parent can watch from the kitchen window.

It is not a courtyard in the old sense. It has no roof of sky, no enclosing wall. But it is the same idea, translated for how a family actually lives here: an outdoor room, planned as carefully as any indoor one, that earns its space by being used every day.

Filed under: process, family