East Frisian house

A Gulf house (German: Gulfhaus), also called a Gulf farmhouse (Gulfhof) or East Frisian house (Ostfriesenhaus), is a type of farmhouse (sometimes called a housebarn in North America) that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries in North Germany. 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.

The Gulf house owes its emergence to economic circumstances. Before its invention the folk of the East Frisian North Sea marshes lived in Old Frisian farmhouses (Altfriesischer Bauernhaus or oud-Friese boerenhuis), a type of unit farmstead (Wohnstallhaus). These small buildings had enough space for the farmers because they did not have to store large harvests. Cereal farming was only possible on a few higher-lying areas, whilst the poorly drained marshes were only suitable as grassland and pastureland. As drainage technology improved with the use of windmills and watermills the fertile marshy areas could be dried out and used extensively for grain farming. In order to store the growing quantities of harvest a house with greater capacity was needed, which is how the Gulf house came into being.

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