Bayt Lothan Arts And Crafts

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The Bayt Lothan Project is located in the former home of Sheikh Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah, the twelfth Amir of Kuwait, in Salmiya. The Project is directed and managed by his daughter, Sheikha Amal Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah.

The house was built in three distinct stages - the first in the late 1930s, the second in the late 1940s, and the third in the 1950s - known respectively as the kitchen courtyard, the family courtyard and the diwan courtyard. The whole building has an area of 4,000 square metres, all of which has been converted into workshops for arts and handicrafts.

The word lothan means shelter. It was the original name of the area in which the house stands, so called because it was a place where ships could take refuge from storms. Today Bayt Lothan provides a shelter in which human creativity, arts and crafts may flourish.

In his book About the History of Kuwait (1959), Seif Marzouk Al-Shamlan, a Kuwaiti historian, describes the various areas of Kuwait. On page 92 he writes:

LOTHAN: in 1344 AH / 1926 AD, one or two houses were built near Salmiya in a place known as 'Lothan', which small groups of friends used as a resort.

Lothan was also mentioned by the poet Khaled Mohamed Al-Faraj:

Our destiny is to maintain our way of life, despite the revolutions of our times; we are satisfied with the simplicity of Lothan as our summer resort while the aristocrats take their vacations in Lausanne.