Why can you hear everything?

A riad has no corridors. Every room opens onto the central courtyard, and the courtyard opens to the sky — which cools the house beautifully and lights it beautifully and, less advertised, works like the bell of a trumpet. A chair scraped at breakfast rises up the well and arrives in every bedroom, clear and strangely intimate, as though the chair were in the room with you.

The walls join in. Medina houses lean shoulder to shoulder, sharing party walls — your bedroom wall may well be the back of the neighbor's kitchen — and rammed earth carries low sounds generously. The cedar doors are solid and handsome and seal against absolutely nothing. So the house hears itself completely: the fountain, the dawn birds, the housekeeper's bucket making its seven o'clock rounds.

None of this was an oversight. The riad was built for one extended family, and a house where the grandmother could hear everything was a house that ran itself. It only became a flaw when strangers started sleeping in it.