Macakizi Hotel

Macakizi Hotel

In the village of Göltürkbükü, on the north shore of the Bodrum peninsula, tucked into a hillside above a private waterfront deck and a pontoon long enough for gulets, Maçakızı began its life in 1977 as a sixteen-room pension with shared bathrooms and cows grazing behind the property, founded by Ayla Emiroğlu, a bohemian Bodrum early-adopter who opened what became the first beach club in Turkey on a site reachable only by boat. The property relocated to its current address in 2000, rebuilt under the direction of Emiroğlu's son, Sahir Erozan, who had spent the intervening decades in Washington DC running restaurants, including Cities in Georgetown, which ran from 1987 to 2007, and who returned to Bodrum carrying both his mother's instincts and a set of international ones. The hotel now runs to 72 rooms and suites across garden-view and sea-view categories, with travertine floors, open-plan bathrooms, rain showers and Rifat Özbek-designed pillows, plus Villa Maçakızı, a ten-room property a ten-minute boat ride from the main jetty, designed in its current form by Rome-based architect Fabrizia Frezza and refined in collaboration with interior designer Barbara Pensoy. The reception area was built in 2000 by Istanbul firm Tabanlıoğlu Architects, led by Murat Tabanlıoğlu and Melkan Gürsel, who also oversaw the revitalisation of the beach facilities from 2012 onwards; the Mediterraneo Pavilion, a black-metal winter garden structure with floor-to-ceiling glazing, was added in 2019 by Ahmet Alataş, an architect who grew up in Emiroğlu's home village. Erozan has personally overseen the interiors from the start and has, by his own account, refused to let architects near them, on the stated grounds that he prefers a lived-in quality over anything pristine. The result is vintage photographs of the hotel's earlier incarnations hung above beds, dogs named Alexis and Vasilis wandering the gardens, and cats underfoot on the waterfront deck. Artworks by Turkish painter Suat Akdemir appear throughout. The main dining offer is built around chef Aret Sahakyan, an Istanbul-born Armenian who worked alongside Erozan in Washington before relocating to Bodrum in 2000: his restaurant on-site holds one Michelin star, awarded in 2024 when the Michelin Guide made its first appearance in Bodrum, and sources lobster and scallops from Çanakkale, shrimp from Mersin, artichokes and asparagus from Aegean producers, and blue crab from Datca. In 2024, Erozan and Sahakyan opened Ayla, a 30-cover restaurant named for Emiroğlu, built into the hillside above the main deck, structured around a three-act tasting menu using olive oil from Memecik village, honey from Çömlekçi, and wine from a cellar running to more than 150 Turkish labels and a curated selection of French, Italian, and Hungarian bottles. The wine list is one of the stronger in the Bodrum peninsula, available by the glass in more than twenty iterations at any given service. At lunch, the tradition Emiroğlu established, a generous buffet of Aegean olive-oil dishes, continues unchanged. The experience has a quality that is genuinely difficult to replicate: a hotel that has been in continuous family hands across two generations and nearly fifty years, that started with writers and painters and still attracts a crowd that is more culturally curious than merely wealthy, where the front-of-house staff have in some cases been with the property for decades, and where the cooking has acquired a star without losing its Aegean informality. The Michelin recognition and the opening of Ayla mark a deliberate tilt toward fine dining that not everyone will welcome, but the daytime proposition, long lunches on the deck, swimming from the private shoreline, the particular blue of Göltürkbükü bay in afternoon light, remains exactly what it was. The interiors are not the kind of spare, considered editorial restraint a certain type of traveller might hope for; Erozan's preference for warmth and personal accumulation means the public spaces feel more lived-in salon than design hotel, which is either exactly right or not what you came for. You should not come in July or August if you want quiet: the hotel seats 500 for Sunday lunch in high season and the bay fills with yachts, and the noise and density of the Türkbükü strip, sometimes compared to Saint-Tropez, can feel at odds with the more intimate version of Maçakızı that exists in May, early June, September, or the winter months when Erozan has increasingly chosen to keep the property open. You should come if what interests you is a hotel with a traceable history and a family logic, a kitchen with two serious restaurants and a long-standing chef who has not chased trends, a beach club that invented itself before beach clubs existed as a category, and a setting on an Aegean bay that has not yet finished being beautiful. The short version: A 72-room family-owned hotel in Göltürkbükü, founded by Ayla Emiroğlu in 1977 and rebuilt by her son Sahir Erozan in 2000, with a one-Michelin-star restaurant helmed by Aret Sahakyan, the first beach club in Turkey, and fifty years of accumulated character.