Like Rick’s Cafe, everybody—or so it would appear during summer’s long, sun-drenched days and jasmine-scented nights—comes to the Macakizi. Here, in this once inconsequential Aegean port on Turkey’s newly discovered southern coast, Sahir Erozan has created more than just another hotel or fashionable beach dub but rather a world of in own, splashed against the sparkling waters of the sea and embraced by a new international jet set of sophisticated travelers, from Manhattan red estate wizards and French media stars to the occasional Kennedy and the opulently tanned and white-bikinied beach princesses from Kazakhstan and Cairo.
Nor that for all high-finance or rich-guy frivolity here on the Turkish Riviera- Merchants hawk “Turkish” silver and dried apricots in the nearby seaside souks, and burly fishermen still sell unrecognizable sea creatures from wooden baskets. Where, too, I ask, are you ever going to find Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia at Sunday brunch on the sundeck overlooking Paul Allen’s yacht, the Octopus? True story. But more about that later I’m getting ahead of myself.
Call them Luxury’s New Lifestyle Nomads—those fiercely curious, competitively discerning travelers manage, before the rest of us, through some sort of carefully calibrated inner radar, to know where to and whom to know. I first met Sahir in Istanbul last January at his house on the Bosphorus. “You must one day come to the Macakizi,” he said with a fluid pronunciation that I still haven’t mastered—properly pronounced it’s Mah-tcha-kee-zeeh. “We’ll have fun.” I told him I had been there having sailed, thanks to the hospitality of good friends, on a particularly magnificent gulet from the port of Göcek out final stop in Bodrum, where we bunked for one night at his hotel. I said I had always hoped to return.
Bodrum is a port city on the southern coast of the Bodrum Peninsula. (Historians, take note: This is also the site of Halicarnassus and the Mausoleum of Maussollos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.) Here, about 45 minutes from the airport, on a winding, dusty road, is Türkbükü, a tiny fishing village with the chic, sophisticated scent of the Cote d’Azur. That, too, is the appeal of the hotel: As the rest of the world becomes bloated with bold-faced and brand names, the Macakizi has most defiantly not. At least not yet. “If we were really smart,” an LA businessman confides to me over a lunch of grilled octopus and a Moet Ice with mint on the rocks, “you and I would scrape together a few bucks and invest now. This place has The New St.-Tropez written all over it.”
In a feat of architecture masterminded high above the Aegean Sea, the Macakizi’s 74 rooms and villas are cantilevered over a rocky hillside, past an open-air cocktail bar, lunch terrace and pool. It is, in fact, about 120 steps from the open-plan lobby, dining morn, gym and hammam to the water’s edge, where Sahir has created his piece de resistance: a huge, U-shaped, tented wooden deck, where hot summer afternoons morph into cool, cashmere-sweatered nights. After dinner it’s the sounds overlapping waves, guests laughing in different languages and the low beat of lounge music into the wee hours.
Now about Ginsburg and Scalia: At 19, Sahir left Turkey for America to “get educated,” as his parents told him. An uncle taught at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore (“Not that I stood a chance of going there,” he says), and as the family was keen on education and one of the more powerful newspapers in Turkey, Washington, D.C., seemed like a good stop. It was– and wasn’t. Sahir ended up not finishing college. “I was always kind of the black sheep of the family,” he says. Instead he began a career as a sommelier, then as captain and waiter, eventually as a restaurateur. There were the fancy joints like Le Pavillon and Le Lion d’Or. Then he created his own, first Cold Med and then Cities in 1987.
Back in Turkey, Sahir’s mother has started the first beach club in Bodrum, in the mid-‘80s. In 2002, her son returned home and expanded on her original idea. Twelve years ago, they had opened the Macakizi in its current incarnation. It was, to be honest, a visit by Caroline Kenned and her husband Edwin Schlossberg, reported by gossip columnist Cindy Adams in the New York Post, that first got my attention. As far as Ruth and Antonin? Sahir says, “I don’t like to comment on famous people. It’s not nice.”
Nice is what this guy specializes in. To the max. His role is to life here a floating banquet of good friends and energy, fabulous food and Sternal summers. “My mother’s now in her seventies, but I try to carry on in her original spirit, that same feeling that this is a living thing. Neither trendy modern nor old and classic. It’s somewhere you feel at home.” Sahir says it’s all about location. they places may have opened more recently (the new Amanruya is 20 minutes away), and more are to come (including a $200 million Mandarin Oriental scheduled for 2014). “I do think this is one of the most perfect locations on which you could build a hotel, a beach and a restaurant. It’s on a slope and the sun goes east to west, so you get light all day, breeze and waves but no choppy waters.”
Life here is all about the sea and the sun, leisurely lunches of the grilled fob and endless muses and candlelit dinners by Ares Sahakyan, the Armenian Turk whom Sahir met years back in D.C. Not that there isn’t plenty to do—seaside shopping for trinkets just down the hill in Türkbükü or perhaps a day at sea, maybe with Sahir himself or on his one-of-a-kind Ferretti 48 high-performance boat, designed as a prototype for a race in Monte Carlo. After all, Leros and that Greek island’s best restaurant, Mylos Tavern, are only an hour away by boat. Just tell them Sahir sent you. They’ll know what you mean. This year Sahir began a major renovation. “Everybody was com-plaining and yelling—’How can you charge this much for rooms with no TV or music?’ What can I say? They all hated my hundred-dollar TVs. So I redid the rooms and replaced them,” he says. When the hotel opens in April (it closes this season on November 1), Sahir will have completely redone every room, the gym and the pool, replacing the latter with an infinity pool fronted by an enormous aquarium.
This year Sahir began a major renovation. “Everybody was com-plaining and yelling—`How can you charge this much for rooms with no TV or music?’ What can I say? They all hated my hundred-dollar TVs. So I redid the rooms and replaced them,” he says. When the hotel opens in April (it closes this season on November 1), Sahir will have completely redone every room, the gym and the pool, replacing the latter with an infinity pool fronted by an enormous aquarium. He won’t touch the original artwork by Suat Akdemir, but Turkish designer Rifat Ozbek will design new bed linens. “Even fish for the aquarium will be from these waters, not those silly bright-colored things from Hawaii,” he says. “This is, after all, Turkey!”