Heap yard
The Haufenhof , also known as the group farm, is an agricultural type of farmstead , primarily in the eastern Alpine region . This type of farm can be found in different forms in large parts of Carinthia , Styria and the neighboring areas of Lower and Upper Austria , where the house forms a group together with the stables and various farm buildings such as grain boxes, fountain huts and others.
This resulted in a relatively large number of buildings of different sizes. These were arranged as functionally as possible in the area. The main building materials used were stone and wood, but bricks were also used. The walls reached a thickness of up to 50 centimeters.
Wood shingles or straw were originally used to cover the roof. Today, clay roof tiles are typically used.
The residential building of the inner Austrian group farms was in large areas a smoking room with the smoking room as the central cooking and living room with an open stove, oven and pig feed kettle.
In the irregular arrangement of the various courtyard buildings, the heap courtyard is seen as the most primitive form of courtyard. An extreme form of the heap yard is the Musha (that's the name in Shona, the national language of Zimbabwe) of some Bantu peoples, here even the living space is distributed across different buildings, separate huts as bedrooms for different generations and the kitchen hut.