We made one decision early that turned out to matter more than any other: every home design would be reviewed by the women who'd actually live in them, before it went to the structural engineer.
What changed because of that
Three things, all small individually but big together:
- Kitchen moved to face the courtyard, not the street. The original plan put it on the front wall for ventilation. Every widow we spoke to said the same thing: cooking should face inward where her children play, not outward where strangers walk past.
- Bathroom doors offset from the bedroom doors. Privacy in joint-family compounds matters more than we realized. A two-foot offset means no one can accidentally see into a bathroom from a bedroom across the courtyard.
- A wider sill on the kitchen window. Wide enough to actually use as workspace. Several women asked for this specifically — they prep food on the windowsill in their current homes because the kitchen is too small.
The final design
Each home is 22 ft × 32 ft, single-storey, with:
- Two bedrooms (10×12 each)
- One kitchen (10×8)
- One bathroom with separate WC (8×8)
- A covered verandah and shared courtyard
- Reinforced concrete roof rated for our seismic zone
- Provision for solar power and a shared tube well
Cluster layout
Homes are grouped in clusters of 4 to 6 around a shared courtyard. The courtyard is the social heart — children play there, women cook collectively during weddings and funerals, and it's where the neighbourhood watch effectively happens.
This is not just an aesthetic choice. Scattered widow housing has measurably worse safety and mental-health outcomes than clustered housing. We took this from research and from listening.
What's next
Engineering drawings go to the contractor for tendering this week. We expect to have a contractor selected within two weeks of Eid, in shaa Allah, with ground-breaking immediately after.