The merchant houses of Kashan were built inward. From the street, nothing but a wall and a modest door; behind it, a sequence of courtyards, each with its pool, its planted beds sunk below the paving and its wind towers drawing cooler air down into vaulted rooms. The Ameri house is among the largest of them, raised for one of the city's leading families and extended over generations, with separate courts for reception and for private life, halls decorated in carved plaster, coloured glass and painted niches. Restored and brought back into use, it allows the logic of the type to be read whole. Filmed in 4K, the programme moves through the house as its inhabitants would have done, from public façade to family quarters, and examines how a desert climate produced one of the most inventive domestic architectures in Iran.
