Çiragan Palace, Istanbul

John Henzell

• Last Updated: November 19. 2009 10:17PM UAE / November 19. 2009 6:17PM GMT

The welcome

One minute we were snarled in traffic on the road leading along the European bank of the Bosphorus and the next we had descended below street level to the arrivals area of the Çragan Palace, insulated with unexpected efficiency from the road chaos outside. We were then met by a phalanx of scarlet-coated staff who look like they could have done service with the British Army in the Napoleonic wars, only to be dragged back to the 21st century by the airport-style scanners used to vet luggage and guests.

One of the staff, a Moroccan woman who spoke both Arabic and English showed two of us to our rooms and we went through the registration process there instead of at the front desk. Instead of the access cards for our rooms being in the standard cardboard sleeve, they were lodged within a 66-page booklet describing the hotel and Istanbul in general. I could go on but you get the idea.

The neighbourhood

Sultan Abdulaziz, the 32nd ruler of the Ottoman Empire, decided this site on the shore of the Bosphorus was good enough to build his palace on, and modern-day visitors will quickly realise why. Across the bustling waterway is Asia and behind is a public park created from the forest in which the sultan once hunted. To the right, in the distance, are the minarets of the Sultanahmet area, Istanbul’s historic heart, and to the left – no doubt unimaginable to the Sultan and postdating his era by a hundred or so years – is the mammoth suspension bridge linking the two continents. As it happened, the sultan only had a few years in the completed palace before being deposed in 1876. He died soon after.

The room

It helps to realise that rooms at the Çragan (it’s pronounced “chiraan”) Palace vary hugely. There’s the palace itself, which was built with all the opulence one would expect of a sultan, but which was gutted by fire in 1910. It stood as a shell for more than 70 years before being renovated as a set of 11 suites with up to four bedrooms each. This is where countless heads of state have stayed, with a list price of up to US$73,880 (Dh274,000) per night. If I’d stayed here, I could have arrived by car, boat or helicopter (it has its own helipad) and would have been met by my own private butler.

Next to it is an E-shaped hotel, which was built in the 1980s (and which feels like it). This structure, however, does do a good job of maximising the rooms’ views of the Bosphorus. My room was bathed in sunlight reflected off the water and offered views to the historic downtown area. A sliding door allowed the crisp autumn air to waft inside (the aircon automatically switched off when the door was opened – smart) and the chairs and table on the terrace invited sitting al fresco and soaking up the passing parade of life on the strait. There are also 102 euphemistically dubbed “park view” rooms at the back that have a vista of the traffic jams.

The service

I’ve always found really good service fascinating to watch, and I frequently found myself observing the staff here work with a seamless mix of efficiency and unintrusiveness, whether it was the waiters working the tables at the buffet breakfast or managing the ebb and flow of people through the bottleneck of the security scanning zone at the entrance. The Moroccan woman who’d checked me in remembered my name as I was leaving a day later, which seemed to sum things up.

The food

Outside on the waterfront terrace of the palace is a glorious place to be on a crisp autumn evening. The Tugra restaurant specialises in Ottoman cuisine and includes recipes made for the sultan in the original palace. The chef prepared a degustation menu of entrées and desserts and we chose our mains courses from 12 options on the photo-album-sized menus, where prices ranged from $29-55 (Dh106-197). Almost without exception, the food was outstanding.

The scene

If not for the palace, this would be just another nice, comfortable and modern hotel with a magnificent position on the Bosphorus. With the palace, it gets the appellation as Turkey’s most expensive hotel and is very clearly the place to be seen by those aiming to make a serious impression.

Loved

The location and the easy-going mood of the place.

Hated

No hates, but a downside of being beside the Bosphorus is that this is a working waterway so if you sleep with the windows wide open (as I did, having dreamed of being able to do so throughout the Abu Dhabi summer) you have the privilege of being serenaded to sleep by the chugging of fishing boat engines or the techno beat of the tourist boats. For purported safety reasons, there are no tea- and coffee-making facilities in the rooms so you can’t make a hot drink to enjoy on the terrace. The palace renovation is just ever-so-slightly on the tacky side of opulent, such as the paint-effect marble pillars.

The verdict

You don’t have to be a head of state in the palace to enjoy staying here but it’s worth shelling out for a Bosphorus view.

The bottom line

Park view rooms cost from $714 (Dh2,622), including taxes. My mid-range Superior Bosphorus View Room cost from $947 (Dh3,478), including taxes.

Çragan Palace Kempinski, Çragan Caddesi No 32, Besiktas, Istanbul (www.kempinski-istanbul.com; 00 90 212 326 4646).