Bait Al Naboodah: Into Another Century

The courtyard is the first thing you see, flooded with light and framed by coral walls that glow pale against the blue sky. Palm and almond trees break the glare, their leaves shifting with the breeze that slips in through malaqaf – wind scoops built into the walls – and drifts across sixteen rooms arranged around this open space. Some sit at ground level, shaded and cool, while others are reached by a staircase whose plaster balustrade still feels cool to the touch even on a hot afternoon.

Obaid bin Eissa Bin Ali Al Shamsi built this house in 1845, when the Gulf’s pearl trade was at its height. Known to everyone as Al Naboodah, he sent pearls as far as Bombay, Zanzibar, and Marseille, and the same dhows that carried them out returned with carved teak doors, heavy beams, and spices that must have lingered in the air long after they were unpacked. His majlis, just across the street, was where coffee was poured, gossip traded, and business sealed – a space where domestic life and international trade blurred without ceremony.

It’s easy to imagine the courtyard in its busiest days: a merchant from Bombay stepping in with a bolt of silk, a French buyer weighing a strand of pearls in the afternoon light, children weaving between visitors as if the whole place was theirs. But the tide turned. By the early 1900s, Japanese cultured pearls had begun flooding the market, cheaper and faster to produce, and fortunes along the Gulf began to falter. The family stayed, but the plaster dulled, the doors stuck in their frames, and the courtyard fell quieter year by year.

When the last relatives left in the 1970s, the house was already marked by water stains and termite scars, the wind scoops still pulling in air to rooms that stood empty. Decades later, careful restoration in the 1990s, and again in 2018, brought the coral walls back to life and reopened the doors to visitors. Today it’s as much a gathering place as a museum. Some mornings begin with a local breakfast in the courtyard – warm khameer bread stacked beside bowls of creamy cheese, the smell of qahwa curling through the air.

When you leave, the noise of the Heart of Sharjah and the clang of souq metalwork fold back around you. That teak door stays in sight for a few steps, and it’s tempting to turn around, push it open, and walk into another century all over again.