Current housing design guidelines in Bahrain focus on purely functional and energy efficiency factors. The Ministry of Housing in Bahrain (MOH) has been providing subsidized houses to its citizens since 1970’s. In 2010, according to the MOH, the demand for new housing units had reached the 50,000 mark and the numbers kept rising with every passing year. A new urban landscape has been created since the beginning of the subsidized housing program in the 1970’s but in 2016, despite the ongoing housing pressure, the great majority of housing projects consists in the continuous reproduction of the same house layout with very few variations, normally related to changes in color and construction techniques to comply with new energy efficiency regulations. The moment houses are delivered to the inhabitants, they are subject to continuous transformations of various kinds: aesthetic, functional and structural. This paper attempts to characterize these transformations in terms of the general spatial structures they entail, looking for potential patterns which might reveal the way inhabitants appropriate the domestic space. The analysis is based on ten MOH projects, finalized between 2012-2016 and distributed throughout Bahrain’s territory. In each project ten houses were randomly selected for analysis. The methodology employed includes semi-structured interviews with residents and empirical observations, in order to map essential information about the families that inhabit these houses, to understand how the domestic space is perceived and used, and to record the nature and justification of the interior transformations. Allied with the empirical observation, a spatial configurational analysis is performed on the original and altered houses in search for potential patterns and regularities. The paper makes a critical reflection on the findings related to the analysis of the housing project, Samaheej, and argues that it is possible to perceive a pattern in the transformations effectuated by the inhabitants which reveal a lack of correspondence between the houses’ original spatial structure and the families’ understanding of what a house should be. These apparent inadequacies are categorized into 3 main groups: distinction, inhabitant-visitor and inhabitant-inhabitant interface. The understanding of the configurational patterns that emerge in the altered houses, can support the development of new design guidelines for the subsidized housing program in the future. © 2019 Beijing JiaoTong University. All rights reserved.

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