Gulf house

A Gulf house (German: Gulfhaus), also called a Gulf farmhouse (Gulfhof) or East Frisian house (Ostfriesenhaus), is a type of byre-dwelling that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries in North Germany.^[1] It is timber-framed and built using post-and-beam construction. Initially Gulf houses appeared in the marshes, but later spread to the Frisian geest. They were distributed across the North Sea coastal regions from West Flanders through the Netherlands, East Frisia and Oldenburg as far as Schleswig-Holstein (as a variant called the Haubarg). This spread was interrupted by the Elbe-Weser Triangle which developed a type of Low German house instead, better known as the Low Saxon house.

Historically, the Gulf house belongs to a larger group of aisled barns, which also include medieval tithe barns, monastery granges and Early Modern buildings on farms and manors in France, Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, Scandinavia and the United States. The word Gulf is derived from Scandinavian gulv ('storage floor') and has probably spread in the context of medieval monastic farms.