· 4-minute read
The shushaband: a wooden window onto the courtyard
The twelve rooms on the courtyard side have a shushaband for a window. In the restoration we did not replace them but repaired them one by one. This is why.
The shushaband is the glazed wooden wall of old Baku houses that faces the courtyard: a large frame, leaves inside it divided into small panes, and a row of top lights above. In summer you open the leaves and the room becomes a veranda; in winter you close them and the light still pours in.
What we kept
In our house the shushabands are made of the wood of 1908. In the Soviet years they had been painted over several times; the restorers took the paint off layer by layer and replaced the rotten parts with the same kind of wood. Half of the coloured glass is old, and the rest we had cut again in the same shades.
Old glass is not hard to tell from new: it holds tiny air bubbles and is slightly wavy. When the morning sun falls on it, faint coloured patches show on the wall.
And the quiet
Behind each shushaband we set a second, modern pane. You cannot see it from outside, but the sound of the restaurant in the courtyard does not reach the room. That is why we call the courtyard rooms the quiet ones.
The courtyard room
