Le Récit
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How we choose.
Four houses for the whole of Cappadocia. Not one more, until another has earned its place.
I
The eye
One question guided the selection: did this house live before it became a hotel?
Cappadocia has a great many hotels carved into the rock, and many of them look alike. A church, a monastic retreat, abandoned village houses, dwellings cut into the cliff: every address we kept has an earlier story that can be told without the help of marketing.
We then set aside everything that was merely decor. The stone must be original, the restoration respectful, the scale human. Finally, we refused duplicates: when two houses told the same story, we kept only one.
What remains are four ways of inhabiting stone: the church, the monastery, the village, the rock.
II
The method
Each house is first studied from public sources: its official website, the press, specialist publications. We cross-check, we verify, and we set aside whatever does not hold.
The texts are then reread, corrected and tightened until only what we are sure of remains. That is the price of what we allow into the journal.
When a house replies, we confirm with it the facts we have put forward, and we say so on its page. Until it does, the page states that its information is being confirmed.
III
Our commitments
iNo house pays to appear in Alcove.
iiWe reproduce no photograph without the rights that go with it. The houses’ images are shown from their own Instagram accounts, exactly as they published them. The Cappadocian landscapes are photographs under a free licence, credited.
iiiThe textures and illustrations on this site are Alcove creations, presented as such. They never pass for photographs.
ivThe chapter stays small. Chapter I holds four houses, and it will never hold more.
IV