Book Description

This stunning collection captures the soul of 25 contemporary Turkish homes in hundreds of photographs taken during each of the four seasons and all over Turkey, from Istanbul and the Black Sea to the Aegean and Cappadocia. The houses range from seaside retreats to modern city apartments, from wooden chalets to stone dwellings, but they all have one thing in common: they are not showcases, they are all homes, lived in and imbued with the spirit of this fascinating country.

Turkey is a country undergoing spectacular transformation. But unlike many other such modernizing processes, this one does not involve the destruction of its rich and varied traditions of design and decoration. Nowhere is this better seen than in the pages of this book, in which the celebrated photographer Solvi dos Santos has traveled throughout Turkey during all four seasons to capture the soul of the contemporary Turkish home.

Here are the intense charm of the minimalist, pine-scented interiors of the Black Sea; the historic details of an antique monastery hidden in the Aegean; the élan of whitewashed Mediterranean courtyards fragrant with jasmine; the elegance of the Ottoman seaside mansions of the Bosphorus; the stark beauty of medieval, sun-baked, stone houses in the deep southeast; and the intimacy of a pied-à-terre in Istanbul’s shady backstreets.

Berrin Torolsan’s text provides a look inside these homes, and into the different worlds of their inhabitants, from hip designers, poets, and artists to teachers, farmers, and country gentlemen, from household names to unknown aesthetes. She uncovers the stories of each house and gives a sense of the geography and history of its location. 250 color illustrations.

Solvi dos Santos is a well-known lifestyle photographer.
Berrin Torolsan is the Publishing Director of Cornucopia

Reviews for At Home in Turkey

• If you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there.

  Berrin Torolsan’s informative text explores the inspiration behind such gems as a classical wooden yali on the Bosphorus; a rustic chalet in the mountains; a tea-planters mansion on the Black Sea; a Cappadocian cave-dwelling, with beautifully hewn piers and arches. We are also given a peek into the lives of some of Turkey’s leading figures, including Orhan Pamuk, Rifat Ozbek, and Ahmet Ertegün, who founded Atlantic Records. A businessman’s collection of his old briefcases is drolly ranged beside shelves of antique busts; sunlight streams into a chamber hewn from the volcanic rock. From Ottoman silverware to country stitching, these photographs testify to the enduring skills of Turkey’s local craftsmen — and to the perceptive eye that knows how to match the classical with the contemporary.

  – Jason Goodwin, The Spectator

• I posit that devotees of Turkey, such as myself, seldom find our thoughts dwelling on its contribution to today’s interior design. We marvel at Byzantine and Ottoman cultures, gaze in awe at Classical sites and adore its fantastic landscapes, but with the publication of this handsome book must add the burgeoning of a contemporary movement revealed by Solvi dos Santos with her camera and Berrin Torolsan with her pen.

  The two of them whisk us from houses round the Black Sea in the North, to the Aegean and Mediterranean in the South, to Istanbul in the West and the lands bordering Syria and Iraq in the East, visiting the houses of decoration-conscious architects, fashionistas, authors, industrialists, and textile and interior designers….

  – Min Hogg, World of Interiors, February 2009

• With contemporary Turkish design slowly gaining recognition in the international design arena, this well-illustrated hardback is a timely reminder of its growing influence.

  – Nicole Swengley, Financial Times, December 2008