Lattice screen (kafes)

A lattice screen, known in Turkish as kafes, is a permeable screen made of thin timber slats crossed diagonally or at right angles and fitted in front of a window or gallery. Its main purpose is privacy: from inside you can see the street, from outside you cannot make out the room. It also breaks the sun, lets air through and gives the facade a distinctive texture.

The kafes in the traditional Turkish house

In Ottoman town houses the kafes appears mostly on upper-floor windows facing the street and on projecting bay windows. It lets people in the private quarters watch the street while keeping the house closed to view. Often it covers only part of a window, or is made as hinged leaves that can be lifted to bring in more light and air. Similar timber or metal screens are found in front of women’s galleries in mosques, at tombs and at public fountains. A dense kafes reads on the facade as an almost solid, semi-transparent surface.

Surveying and restoring a kafes

• Slat section, spacing and joint type are measured, and the pattern is drawn over several repeats.
• Rotten, broken or missing slats are replaced in the same timber species and section, while sound ones stay in place.
• The window frame and bay construction carrying the screen are inspected together, since decay often starts there.

Screens visible in old photographs but lost today are valuable evidence in a restitution study. In a 3D model, building the kafes slat by slat or as a surface with an opacity map gives both the right daytime facade and the broken light falling inside.