Timber Frame Homes Across Turkey

Production is in Gölbaşı, Ankara; construction is nationwide. What changes is not the model but the insulation, seismic and climate design for where the plot is.

Prefix's production facility is in Gölbaşı, Ankara, and we build in every province in Turkey. Timber frame's advantage here is that a significant share of the structure is produced under controlled factory conditions and transported to site — which cuts both the time spent on site and the dependence on weather.

What actually changes by region

A common misconception is that the same house is built the same way everywhere in Turkey. The model can be identical; but three things change with the location of the plot, and they are what the engineering side of the design consists of.

• Insulation — TS 825 divides Turkey into five degree-day zones; the insulation calculation for a house in Antalya is not the calculation for one in Erzurum.
• Earthquakes — TBDY 2018 gives an acceleration value for every parcel by coordinate; the calculation follows the location of the plot, not the name of the province.
• Horizontal and vertical loads — snow load in the Uludağ foothills, wind load on the Çanakkale coast, alluvial ground on the Menderes plain.
• Humidity and salt — on the Black Sea and Aegean coasts, cladding details and material selection have to be more rigorous than inland.

Turkey's five insulation zones

TS 825, the Turkish thermal insulation standard, divides the country into five degree-day zones by heating demand. The higher the zone number, the more insulation is required. In timber frame this is a tunable parameter: because the cavity between the studs is already the insulation volume, the insulation thickness is set to the zone.

Earthquakes: one rule across all 81 provinces

Since 2019 there has been no such thing as a "first-degree earthquake zone" in Turkey. The Turkish Building Earthquake Code (TBDY 2018) retired the old five-tier map and replaced it with a continuous hazard map giving a separate acceleration value for every coordinate. The seismic load on a plot follows the coordinates of the parcel, not the name of the province — two districts of the same province can carry different values.

Timber frame's seismic advantage rests on the same two reasons everywhere in the country. First, mass: earthquake force follows F = m·a, and a timber frame house weighs a fraction of an equivalent concrete building. Second, ductility: a timber diaphragm tied together by hundreds of nailed connections deforms while absorbing energy across them, rather than failing brittlely all at once. This is why housing in high-seismic regions from California to Japan is predominantly timber frame.

There is a condition: the system's light weight only becomes an advantage when a continuous load path is built. An unbroken structural chain from roof to foundation, a sill plate anchored into the foundation, anchor bolts, and hold-down connections that resist overturning. Without those details, light weight stops being an advantage.

Transport, assembly and site access

Panels and structural components are shipped by road from Gölbaşı. Distance is a small part of the planning; what really governs it is site access. On a site visit the first things we look at are turning room for the truck, level ground for the crane, and the width of the approach road. On forest, steep-slope and island parcels these directly affect the schedule; on island projects the ferry crossing is planned separately.

Whichever province your plot is in, the process starts the same way: title deed and zoning status, plot dimensions and slope, geotechnical survey. Choosing a model before those three are settled is a premature step.

Regional pages

We have prepared detailed pages for the provinces below — each covering that region's climate zone, seismic situation, plot character, and which models suit it and why. If your plot is in a province not on the list, that does not mean we do not build there; get in touch.