Guide
Akçakoca and the villages around it hold a good deal of vernacular building, and it does not all look alike: the form changes with the period a house was raised in and with where the people who settled that village came from. Most of the surviving examples stand in Yukarı Mahalle, one of the oldest parts of the district and the one known for them.
A hundred and sixty of these houses are protected as a conservation area, and some have been restored. They are between roughly a century and a half and two centuries old, and they fall into three groups.
The oldest are single-storey and rectangular, with generous kitchens and narrow rooms. The second group is two-storeyed on an almost square plan, with many windows but narrow ones; they sit on stone footings and are built up in timber frame and lath, the ground floor rendered on the outside and the upper storey clad in wood, with broad wooden arbours. The third and most recent group has wide windows and lower ceilings, wooden floors and ceilings, and rendered outer walls.
