Gulf house

A gulf house (East Frisian Low Saxon: gulfhuus; German: Gulfhaus), also called a gulf farmhouse (gulfhof) or East Frisian house (Oostfräisenhuus), is a type of byre-dwelling that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries in North Germany. The core of the gulf house consists of a timber‑framed barn, which is built using a post-and-beam construction. Initially gulf houses and gulf barns appeared in the coastal marshes, but later spread to the Frisian uplands or geest. They were distributed across the North Sea coastal regions from Brabant and West Flanders through the Netherlands, East Frisia and Oldenburg as far as Schleswig-Holstein (as a variant called the Haubarg) and Northern Jutland. 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 East Frisian Low Saxon word gulf (West Frisian: golle) is derived from Scandinavian gulv ('storage floor') and has probably spread in the context of medieval monastic farms.

In the Netherlands, a distinction is made between the Frisian barn as such, and the related farm subtype known as the Oldambt farm, which in Germany is also called the Ostfriesenhaus. The other subtypes are the Frisian farmhouse ("house with Frisian barn"), the Haubarg or stolpboerderij (a type of housebarn from North-Holland and Eiderstedt), and the closely related stjelp farm in Friesland. Main types of gulf barns are the Flemish barn, the Brabant barn or grange en long, the Zeeland barn, the West-Flemish bergschuur, and the Northern Jutland agerumslade.