Sofa (central hall)

The sofa is the large space of the traditional Turkish house onto which the rooms open, serving both as circulation and as a shared living area. The stair usually arrives in the sofa and the rooms are arranged around it. It is far more than a corridor: people sat there in summer, received guests there and carried out household work there. The house’s plan type is largely defined by the position and shape of its sofa.

The sofa in the Turkish house

Plan studies group houses by where the sofa sits:

• Outer sofa plan: the sofa runs in front of the rooms as a gallery, open on one side or glazed later; houses with a hayat belong here.
• Inner sofa plan: the sofa lies between two rows of rooms and takes light from both ends.
• Central sofa plan: the sofa is in the middle of the house with rooms on all four sides, usually in large town mansions.

Iwans opening off the sofa, raised corner platforms and bay windows projecting over the street create different sitting places around it. The orientation and number of windows decide which part of the sofa is used at different times of day.

The sofa in survey and restoration

Because it is the backbone of the plan, the sofa is the first space to read in a survey. Later partitions, glazed-in galleries or parts of the sofa absorbed into rooms can hide the original layout; a restitution study traces floorboard joints, ceiling battens and door positions to separate these changes. In adaptive reuse, keeping the sofa’s open, shared character is a way of keeping the spirit of the house. Modelled in 3D with the rooms around it, the sofa makes the spatial flow of the Turkish house easy to grasp.