Adaptability in Reusing Historic Houses: The Cases of Lowlagar House, Bagh-e Ferdows Mansion and the Iranian House

The adaptation of historic built environments with new uses is a significant approach for the country’s cultural heritage, with its main objective being preserving some cultural values for future generations. Designed in full harmony with local climate, materials and cultural structures, valuable traditional houses in Iranian cities are widely abandoned. To preserve this heritage and encounter the dilapidation caused by these voids in historic fabrics, new uses have been introduced into these houses. The main question is ‘what is the most important criteria for appropriate adaptation?’. The present paper starts with investigating the literature extracting adaptability criteria, and then moves on to assess three examples representing types of usual designated new uses. Understanding the fact that countless parallels are currently under way in the country, it attempts to scrutinise challenges and opportunities of such reuses in order to achieve more appropriate ways of adaptation. The paper adopts case studies and surveys as its core approach. Using extracted criteria, questions have been asked from both experts and non-experts, which is helped by architecturally oriented case studies to identify the challenges. The results show that in all three cases the cultural identity is stabilised, the local economy is flourished and environmental gains are achieved. Nevertheless, there has been poor stakeholder participation, and a need was left unfulfilled for structural reviews and reinforcements.