The most striking thing about Sana'a is the houses themselves — narrow tower houses of five to nine storeys, built of dressed stone on the lower floors and mud brick above, each storey banded with elaborate white gypsum work around the arched windows and topped with stained-glass qamariya lights. From a distance the whole city looks like a single carved decorative object.
Each house traditionally lodged one extended family. The ground floor was for animals and storage, the middle floors for the kitchen, the diwan (reception), and the bedrooms, and the top floor for the mafraj — a high-windowed room with cushioned benches where the men would meet to chew qat in the afternoons. The construction technique uses no steel and no concrete, only stone, mud brick, lime, and wood, and the houses have stood for centuries.