It is a rare enough occurrence to fall in love with a 17th-century courtyard house in the heart of Tunis’s old walled quarter; it is more surprising still to ask John Pawson, the architect renowned for his minimalist approach, to redesign it. This is what happened more than 20 years ago to a French design consultant living in Paris, long familiar with Tunis, though not, it has to be said, with living in a medina.
Originally settled in the late seventh century, the historic area in Tunis was one of the first Arabo-Muslim towns of the Maghreb and was the capital of several of the region’s most significant dynasties. With its many souks, residential quarters, madrassas, mosques and zawiyahs (mausoleums), monuments and gates, it is among the best conserved of its kind in the Islamic world. It was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1979.
Nevertheless, as the owner himself concedes, it may seem a strange choice for a holiday home – reachable only on foot through the winding, crowded streets and folded into the dense fabric of a city of more than two million inhabitants. But, as he comments, you can never predict a coup de foudre. Like all large medina dwellings, the dar (a traditional town house) is at a dead end of an alley. The wooden door, decorated in traditional style with large black nails, is all that can be seen from the outside. Beyond it lies a dimly lit passageway that leads, via tall louvred doors that fold back, on to the internal courtyard. (These doors are secured from the inside by means of a peculiar, infallible locking system: there are no keys, but instead sliding wooden bars and vice movements.)
The cubic volume of the nine-square-metre courtyard, which frames the bright blue sky, gives the feeling of being in a work by Donald Judd. The seville orange tree in the middle of the patio has grown large and leafy, breaking the space’s stark minimalism, but is in keeping with the tradition in this part of the world to plant such trees in courtyards for shade to cool the house in summer and provide fruit in springtime to make a delicious bitter-orange marmalade.
The house was purchased from an old couple, the neighbourhood’s former postman and his wife, who lived in a small part of the ground floor. Their children had been gone for a long time. Electricity was scarce and it had no running water. The owner was very proud of the well that provided drinking water – not only a luxury in a climate like Tunisia’s, but a sign of an extremely old settlement. Everything was fairly dilapidated, but the proportions of the rooms and the courtyard had a lot of charm. Nobody had been to the first floor since World War II; there was still graffiti left by German soldiers. As the dar is in the middle of the medina, next to the main mosque, the Jamaa ez-Zitouna (the minaret of which you can see from the terrace), it seems likely that it was built for a qadi, or Islamic judge, a key figure in pre-modern Muslim society.
The house needed to be rebuilt, which took three years. Its location next to the main souk meant that building materials could only be brought to the site on Sundays, when the shops were closed. The other challenge was to figure out a way to get up to the terraces, given that the ground floor has six-metre-high ceilings and the old stairway was difficult to navigate. John had the brilliant idea of knocking down some of the kitchen walls to make room for a sculptural stairway that perfectly integrates into the traditional architecture of the house and the walled city.
Encased within white walls, the staircase sets up a graphic dialogue between light and dark that resonates with both ancient and contemporary design, as if it had always existed and yet it is entirely new. The whole building is in fact a play of volume and void, arranged as it is around the central empty space of the courtyard, which serves both as a passageway connecting the rooms that surround it and as an extended living space in its own right. This architectural typology, in use across the Arab world for millennia, has long been of interest to John.
In the case of the Tunis house, the four mirrored doors of the patio open on to long, narrow and very high rooms with beamed ceilings and plaster-decorated arches: the greenish dining room, a master bedroom with a bathroom made from local stone, and another bedroom. The patio also connects to a wing of the house that includes a living room with a yet-to-be-completed hammam, a bedroom and living room on the upper floor. John designed some of the furniture, working with Tunisian craftsmen to create the patio table and benches from local stone, as well as sinks, bathtubs and wooden beds. Monolithic stone volumes, filled or empty, are used to partition rooms and create hidden storage and wardrobe space.
From the other side of the patio, there is access to the main, almost open-air, kitchen and to the staircases that lead to various terraces at different levels as well as to the owner’s apartment, a studio/library with bedroom overlooking the patio. From there, a steep staircase leads to the owner’s favourite room of all, a tiny space with a miniature kitchen and shower overlooking the medina roofs, facing into the wind. The guardian’s quarters, also at the top of the house, maintain the original building’s character, with tiled walls, blue doors and a small tiled patio overlooking rooftops and terraces. In this peaceful place, which feels a thousand miles away from the bustle of the surrounding souk, time slows down, and the silence is broken only five times a day as the city reverberates with calls to prayer.
A version of this article appeared in the February 2024 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
