Rich people can be awful. Nowhere is this more true than in their unnatural habitat – the luxury hotel. There’s only one thing worse than tourists, and that’s wealthy, entitled tourists with their bratty kids and whiny complaints. How to enjoy the world of luxury travel while avoiding the luxury travellers? Easy. Go to blighted, war-torn, no-longer-fashionable places once bathed in dosh and celebrity but which now lie neglected and forgotten, washed up by the currents of history.

Doubtless there is something decadent and orientalist about loving sad, forgotten old hotels

Doubtless there is something decadent and orientalist about loving sad, forgotten old hotels

My favourite and archetype of such places is the Splendid Hotel on Buyukada, an island in the Sea of Marmara an hour’s ferry ride from Istanbul. This five-storey wooden building was built in 1908 as the last word in seaside luxury, complete with a colonnaded palm court, bezique tables and large, lugubrious paintings of Swiss landscapes. Happily (for me at least, as I lived in a wooden Ottoman mansion on the island for fifteen years), Buyukada ceased to be a fashionable Hamptons-style playground for the city’s haute bourgeoisie in the 1950s, and was further depopulated after the last Constantinopolitan Greeks were chased out soon thereafter.

The Splendid remains as a charming relic which creaks when the lodos southern wind blows and boasts an Otis elevator older than the Turkish Republic. The rooms still have their original Edwardian furniture, and old Jewish ladies who take rooms for the whole summer play cards all afternoon in lounges where it is forever 1922. The owners – the estimable Hamamcioglu family, whose summer flat occupies the........

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