The Old Courtyard House or Bayt Arabi is a type of traditional domestic architecture prevalent in Syria. Cities like Aleppo, Damascus and Hama feature examples that range from the modest to the sumptuous, dating from the 16th-18th centuries, featuring distinctive ornate architectural spaces like the qa’a or winter reception room, and decoration such as exquisite wooden wall revetments. Today the Courtyard House is perceived as an essential element of Syrian urban architecture. Museums of Popular Traditions celebrate great mansions with recreated dioramas of daily life in a vaguely defined pre-modern period. In addition especially since the 1990s, many courtyard houses have been refurbished as restaurants, hotels and luxury dwellings, prompting the gentrification of entire neighborhoods (as in the case of Judayda in Aleppo). This paper traces the modern history of the courtyard house. It was not always an object of nostalgic longing. Shortly after independence, it was excoriated as backwards and unhygienic, and many examples were razed during urban modernization schemes. Some Syrian women writers have deplored the drudgery of housekeeping the courtyard house requires. Since the early 1990s, however, Syrian popular culture has witnessed a renewed interest in the visible past. Under the rubric of “al-‘awda ila al-tarikh” (“the return to history”), cultural forms such as television serials focusing on the recent past, filmed in historic settings, are eagerly consumed. Old and new novels set in historic periods and memoirs are widely read. The courtyard house has become a focus of such cultural productions. Anthropologists and historians of contemporary Syria have noted the peculiar trajectories of this specific element from the past from museum displays to reproduction and recontextualization as settings for restaurants, festivals, or nightclubs. These constructions of the past, imbued with nostalgia, often foreground traditional gender roles, that are thus legitimized by their presumed long history. This paper critiques literary constructions of the “Old Courtyard House” and of its physical preservation. It emphasizes the lenses of gender and nostalgia to make explicit how the discursive and physical constructions of the Old Courtyard House perform a political role in the present.