For design
Casa dell'Arte
Torba, Bodrum · Turkey
A private art collection you are allowed to sleep inside. That is the shortest way to describe Casa dell'Arte, and it is also the most accurate.
Torba sits on the northern, quieter shore of the Bodrum peninsula, a fishing village that never grew into a resort strip. The Büyükkuşoğlu family spent three decades buying contemporary Turkish art, and rather than lock it in a house they hung it through one, then opened the doors. Canvases fill the lobby and the garden salon, the corridors, the twelve suites. Some pieces carry a small label, museum-style. Outside, timber jetties run out over clear water with the orange-and-white umbrellas the place is known for, and a short stretch of beach closes the picture. It is small and it is seasonal, open only through the warm months. That is part of the point.
Dinner is at Cotto Sul Mare, an Italian kitchen set over the water with the Capri and Amalfi coast on its mind. Burrata with good salt, fresh pasta, fish from the wood fire, a spritz on the deck while the light goes. It is not trying to be inventive and it does not need to be. You eat with your feet more or less over the Aegean, which is the kind of thing Bodrum does well and this address does quietly.
Plenty of hotels hang art. Here the art came first and the hotel was built to hold it, which is a different order of things. Casa dell'Arte was Turkey's first art hotel, and a residency programme keeps living artists on site through the season, so the collection is worked rather than merely displayed. The twelve suites are named for the zodiac; the two Duplexes carry the strongest canvases and the most room. Be clear about what this is not. There is no sprawling spa campus, the standard suites are compact at fifty square metres, and when the season ends it closes. Come for the paintings and the jetty, not for scale.
