Diriyah Gate Residences

The challenge

The design code required load-bearing mudbrick walls to a genuine Najdi specification, not a rendered blockwork imitation. Almost nobody in the modern Saudi contracting market still builds this way, and the material behaves nothing like concrete.

Our approach

We set up an on-site brick yard and produced all 1.9 million blocks within four kilometres of the plot, using soil from the excavation itself. That removed both the haulage cost and the risk of a supplier changing the mix halfway through.

Fourteen of our masons trained for six weeks under two heritage craftsmen from Al Ghat before a single wall went up. We then built a full-height mock-up villa and left it through a summer and a rainy season before committing to the details.

The outcome

All 168 units handed over on the contract date. The mock-up villa is still standing on site as the reference sample, and the heritage authority adopted our wall detail as a reference specification for later phases.