We started selling courtyards because we kept selling the wrong thing.
The Courtyard Collective began when two of us, both raised in Tbilisi's Italian courtyards, watched flat after flat get sold by the square meter to buyers who never met the people they'd share a stairwell with for the next thirty years. It went badly more often than it should have. So we changed the order of things. Now nobody buys through us until they've sat in the courtyard, met the neighbors, and been handed at least one glass of something. We catalog each courtyard the way others catalog kitchens: the age of the grapevine, the temperature of the gossip, who keeps the shared table and who's allowed near it. We're not selling you privacy. We're selling you the opposite, and we want you to be sure you want it before the notary does.
A doorway in Sololaki — the kind of detail you only notice on the second visit.
Four quiet checks before we list a courtyard.
- An afternoon with at least two long-term residents, on their own terms.
- An honest grapevine-age and gossip-rating reading we put in writing.
- Confirmation that the shared spaces are actually shared — table, ladder, stairwell cat included.
- A standing invitation from the neighbors to bring buyers around for tea.