Cover The Soho House in Istanbul, Turkey, which Rodney Alday notes is one of the best designed spaces
The Soho House in Istanbul, Turkey, which Rodney Alday notes is one of the best designed spaces
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Filipino designer Rodney Alday guides us through a Turkey where heritage and modernity collide with compelling style
By any contemporary measure of style, Turkey has long outgrown its reputation as the land of airport layovers and over-sauced holiday birds. Straddling continents the way some people straddle careers, it exists at the complicated and beguiling intersection of the old world and the new. And few guides navigate that intersection better than Rodney Alday, a Filipino interior designer based in London whose taste is as sharp as his passport is full.
Alday recently returned from Istanbul with a short but pointed list of places and artworks that make the city feel as if it is permanently in the middle of a very elegant reinvention. Consider it less an itinerary than a curated whisper from someone who has mastered the art of knowing exactly where to look.
More from Tatler: The cultural wanderer’s guide to Istanbul, Turkey
Above A sunlit waterfront promenade at Galataport in Istanbul, looking across the Bosphorus toward the historic peninsula
Above The facade of Istanbul Modern, Turkey’s flagship contemporary art museum
A sunlit waterfront promenade at Galataport in Istanbul, looking across the Bosphorus toward the historic peninsula
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The new Istanbul: Galataport & the Infinite Screen
At the forefront of Istanbul’s modern renaissance is Galataport, the city’s polished waterfront development and home to the newly refined Istanbul Modern. It has been described as where the city’s contemporary spirit feels most assured. Part promenade, part cultural hub, it’s the sort of place where one might wander into a museum between lunch and an espresso, then stay long enough to forget both.
Inside this enclave of steel, glass and fresh ambition sits the immersive Infinity Room by Refik Anadol, a digital spectacle that seems to dissolve the distinction between architecture and hallucination. It’s hypnotic, as though one is inside the artwork and the artwork is inside you. It’s contemporary Turkish imagination at its most global.
Above Inside the ‘Infinity Room’ by Refik Anadol
Above A close-up of the ‘Infinity Room’ by Refik Anadol
Inside the ‘Infinity Room’ by Refik Anadol
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Chiharu Shiota’s Between Worlds unfolds like a suspended dream, an intricate constellation of red threads stretched into a vast, web-like cosmos that seems to hum with memory and longing. Within this dense choreography of lines, everyday objects become almost talismanic, held in a state of exquisite suspension, as though time itself had paused to consider them. The installation possesses a haunting elegance: fragile yet forceful and delicate all at once. It is the rare work that feels both profoundly intimate and unapologetically monumental, drawing you in not with spectacle but with the quiet authority of an artist who understands that emotion, when rendered with precision, can fill a room more completely than any architecture.
Above ‘Between Worlds’ by Chiharu Shiota
‘Between Worlds’ by Chiharu Shiota
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Also on Alday’s list is Race Car by Mehmet Güleryüz, an artwork that embodies Istanbul’s current mood: restless, energetic, and unwilling to stay politely in its lane. It feels like a metaphor for the city, fast, expressive, slightly ungovernable.
See also: When teleseryes leap borders: Philippine dramas reimagined overseas
Above ‘Race Car’ by Mehmet Güleryüz
Above The historic Dolmabahçe Clock Tower
‘Race Car’ by Mehmet Güleryüz
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Where the old world sleeps: Soho House Istanbul
If Galataport represents the forward march of capital and culture, Soho House Istanbul stands as a resplendent reminder that the past, when edited well, can still command a room.
Set in a 19th-century palazzo in Karaköy, which Alday muses is “a cool area,” this is not the kind of Soho House that trades in exposed brick and start-up energy. Instead, it deals in frescoes, carved marble, Ionic fantasies and a sense of decadence that predates the phrase creative class by about two centuries.
“I would consider this one of the best and most unique of the Soho Houses,” Alday observes. “The other one is in Mexico.” It is a discerning comparison: only these two Houses have mastered the alchemy of transporting you somewhere culturally exacting, not simply somewhere aesthetically branded.
Above Soho House Istanbul’s Cecconi’s dining room
Above Soho House Istanbul’s bar inside Palazzo Corpi
Soho House Istanbul’s Cecconi’s dining room
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Where he lands in the city
When attempting to interpret the photographs taken by Alday, it seems Turkey’s magic lies in its refusal to choose a side. It is neither wholly modern nor contentedly ancient, neither chic nor rustic—and precisely for that reason, it is all of these things at once. He believes Istanbul’s allure lies in its unresolved edges; cities that have settled into a fixed identity, he notes, inevitably lose their intrigue, but Istanbul refuses to do so.
Which is perhaps the simplest way to understand its hold over designers, architects and aesthetes the world over: Istanbul isn’t trying to keep up. It’s pulling ahead.
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