Hotel Unique - Boutique Class

Hotel Unique - Boutique Class

Perched onto a cliffside above Fethiye Marina in the Karagözler district, the hotel is built into terraces cut straight into the rock, a piece of landscape architecture as deliberate as the building above it, and unusually, an entirely new construction rather than a restoration, opened in 2014 by the same ownership group behind Yacht Classic and Yacht Boheme further along this stretch of the Turkish Aegean coast. The nineteen original rooms and suites climb the hillside in staggered levels, since expanded with an annex block (guests will find it listed as Mandarin House), and the whole thing was designed by an architect from Istanbul whose name the hotel keeps quietly off its own marketing, though the result won Best Luxury Design Hotel in Europe at the 10th World Luxury Hotel Awards in Doha, in October 2016. The Antique Theatre of Telmessos is a hundred metres up the hill, Paspatur's old town lanes are a fifteen minute walk, and Dalaman Airport is roughly an hour by car. Inside, the salvage is the point without being announced as such, hundred and fifty year old wooden beams and stone reclaimed from older buildings that once stood on this patch of hillside, carved doors, painted shutters, ironwork staircases running alongside the lifts. Rooms are individually decorated rather than run off a single template, several with private whirlpool tubs on the terrace, most with sea or mountain views over the marina. Nude Restaurant serves an international menu on a terrace that does most of the talking, Classic Spa (shared with sister property Yacht Classic) has the hammam and steam room, and the hotel's own boat, the Octobre Rouge, takes guests along the Lycian coastline for the day. Bicycles are free to borrow, and there's a pool cut into the hillside itself with a sun deck above the harbour. What it feels like, mostly, is a small, quiet cliffside house that happens to run a restaurant and a boat, adults only, sixteen and over, with staff who know returning guests by name and a resident population of cats that the reviews mention almost as often as the view. It suits a couple who want somewhere with a sense of arrival built in, quite literally, given the stepped approach from the marina road, and who don't mind that the classification boards still list it as three stars while the design does most of the actual talking. It's a hotel for people who notice joinery. You should not come if you're travelling with children, or if you want a big pool deck, a beach on the doorstep, or the anonymity of a larger property. You should come if you want a small, family-run hillside hotel where the architecture is the main event, where breakfast is taken looking down at the harbour, and where a day on the water is arranged from reception rather than booked through an app. The short version: A nineteen-room (now expanded) cliffside hotel in Fethiye's Karagözler district, built in 2014 from reclaimed timber and stone, adults only, with its own restaurant, hammam, and yacht for coastal day trips.