Restoration / Architecture · Design and Construction
Guide · YOY Mimarlık
What function should a restored house be given?
What becomes of an Antakya house once it has been repaired? A dwelling, a café, a cultural venue? The decision on function is not a technical detail of the restoration but the decision that settles the building’s future. An unused house is lost; a wrongly used house is lost in another way.
Use is not the opposite of conservation but its condition
A common fallacy in conservation debate is that the best protection is not to touch the building at all. In practice the opposite holds: an unused building goes unmaintained, and an unmaintained building collapses. That is what happened in Antakya through the second half of the twentieth century — as families became nuclear and the city moved to the north-west, the old houses were abandoned, and some of those abandoned were demolished and replaced.
Giving an Antakya house a function is therefore not a “next step” lying outside the conservation project. What loads the building will carry, how many people will use it, where the wet spaces will go, how the services will run — all of these directly determine the restoration decisions. A correct restoration project cannot be made for a building whose function is unknown.
One of the questions we ask at the first meeting is therefore always the same: who will live or work in this house, and how? If the answer is “we do not know yet”, we frame the project to be as flexible and as reversible as we can — but that is a precaution against uncertainty, not a preference.
The house that becomes a café: gain and risk
In the years before the earthquake there was a clear trend in Old Antakya: restored houses turning into cafés, restaurants and hotels. The gain was plain. Buildings left to fall down were repaired, streets came back to life, houses became visible again and the number of registered buildings rose — where in the early 1980s some twenty buildings were recorded as registered by the museum directorate, by 2009 the municipality reported 544.
But the same transformation carries a risk, and one openly discussed in the academic literature: that the identity of a place comes to rest on a staged “oldness” in place of its actual history. Old photographs on the wall, copper vessels and local objects produce an atmosphere; convincing as that atmosphere may be for a visitor, it does not tell the building’s own layers. The house can become the set for its own story.
The difference is something technically measurable. Did the original element stay in place, or was a likeness made and put there instead? Was the courtyard paving kept, or was concrete poured? Is the bird niche open, or has it been closed up and turned into a lighting recess? A place looking “authentic” and a place being documented are different things; conservation is concerned with the second.
The courtyard, the most fragile point of the decision
In a change of function the first pressure falls on the courtyard. For a café the courtyard is seating; as tables arrive the paving is hardened, an overhead cover is sought for shade, heaters and services are added, the well and pool are closed over. Yet in the Antakya house the courtyard is not a void but the plan itself. A house that loses the logic of its courtyard loses its architectural identity even if its facade has been perfectly repaired.
This is not a theoretical worry. Academic studies have plainly recorded that repairs in the area remained for years at the scale of facades and streets, that courtyards were left outside the scope, and that courtyard elements — well, pool, seki, lamp niche — were made redundant or covered over. Cut stone and mosaics in courtyard floors were surfaced in concrete to make cleaning easier.
Our criterion is this: the new function must not spoil the legibility of the courtyard. Tables may be placed, lighting added, an overhead cover discussed — but the limits, the levels, the paving texture and the fixed elements of the court (the well mouth, the rim of the pool, the seki, the drainage channel) must stay visible and be surrounded by demountable solutions. Everything added should be able, when one day it is removed, to leave the courtyard as it was.
The house was already a workplace
The idea that giving an Antakya house a commercial function runs against tradition is mistaken. These houses were never only dwellings. Antakya was for centuries a centre of silk production and trade: figures from the early 1900s record 2,553 shops, 330 stores and 30 silk factories in the city; before 1914 hundreds of thousands of kilograms of cocoons were produced there each year, the product travelling by way of Aleppo to Marseille and Milan.
That production was largely distributed through the houses. The mulberry in the courtyard was not only for shade and fruit — it fed the silkworm. Airy upper rooms and roof voids were used for rearing, drying and storage. Until recently houses were still working in Antakya with weaving production and sale on the ground floor and living quarters above.
The conclusion follows: to make or trade something in an Antakya house is not against the nature of the building but close to its historical use. The problem is not that a function is commercial but how that function uses the building. A craft workshop, a weaving room, small-scale making and selling — these usually harm an Antakya house less than a kitchen-and-restaurant arrangement with heavy servicing, and bring the place closer to its own story.
The earthquake tested the conversions too
This debate has an examination result too. A study of registered traditional houses in Antakya that had been restored and given hotel or guesthouse functions before the earthquake followed ten of them one by one after 6 February 2023. The outcome: three came through undamaged or slightly damaged, four were heavily damaged, three collapsed.
What made the difference appears to be not the function but the quality of the intervention. In one of the collapsed examples, floor heights had been lowered during conversion to a hotel so that a third storey could be added, the original opening onto the courtyard had been closed, and the steel sections installed for strengthening had not been fully integrated into one part of the facade. What brought the building down, in other words, was not its being a café or a hotel but the loss of its original plan and the balance of its mass.
The finding fits Antakya’s own building tradition. Because of earthquakes the city never favoured tall buildings through its history, producing one- and two-storey houses instead. The upper floor was already lightened — in bağdadi or timber frame. Adding a storey later on top of a ground floor of stone masonry reverses that balance: mass grows heavier at the top and the seismic force with it.
The criterion that follows is plain: in a conversion project, adding storeys and altering floor heights are the hardest items to argue for. The two interventions most attractive for commercial return are often the most expensive structurally. Before asking how many rooms can be fitted into a building, one should ask what mass that building carries.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I turn my registered house into a café or boutique hotel?
In principle yes; a change of function is possible in registered buildings and is submitted for Regional Conservation Board approval together with the restoration project. The board assesses the effect of the proposed function on the structural system, the plan and the original elements. What eases approval is not the function itself but how the project manages those effects: where the wet spaces go, how the services are routed, how reversible the additions are.
What does reversibility mean in practice?
It means that every added element can be removed without permanent harm to the original fabric. In practice: fixings made into the joints rather than into original stone; services run visibly or gathered under the floor instead of being buried in walls; new partitions standing on their own feet rather than leaning on the structure; kitchens and wet spaces placed in later additions rather than in original rooms. The test is simple: if this addition were removed tomorrow, would a wound remain?
I want to go on living in my house — is that possible?
It is possible, and from a conservation point of view often the best option. A house that is lived in continuously is maintained, and problems are noticed while they are small. A residential function places less load on the building than commercial ones. Modern comfort — heating, insulation, bathroom, kitchen — can be resolved in a registered building too; these are not things the board objects to, provided they are installed without destroying original elements and in a reversible way.
Source
The principal sources for this article: Gündüz, S. (2021). An Overview of Old Antioch Houses from the Perspective of Urban Identity. Journal of Cultural Studies, 11, 1–16, DOI: 10.46250/kulturder.987509; Bozkurt, S. G. (2019). A study on the courtyard features of the traditional houses of Antakya. Turkish Journal of Forest Science, 3 (1), 1–12; Cengiz, A. K. (2014). Present-day use and interpretation of the old Antakya houses by their residents. MKÜ Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences, 11 (25), 111–130; Yıldırım, M. (2022). The development of the silk industry in the Ottoman and Republican periods and its situation in Hatay. Journal of Politics, Economy and Management, 5 (2), 130–143. For the post-earthquake condition of ten houses converted into hotels: Kocabaş, A. Ö. (2025). An Evaluation with Examples of the Post-Earthquake Conservation Status of Traditional Antakya Houses Reused as Accommodation. Master’s thesis, Adana Alparslan Türkeş Science and Technology University. For the tradition of storey numbers: Arıman, B. (2002). Typological Analysis Studies within the Historic Fabric of the City of Antakya. Master’s thesis, Istanbul Technical University. The figures come from those studies; the conservation commentary and project criteria are our own.