Rixos Residences

The Luxury Real Estate Film Engine Driving Rixos Tersane Sales

Fettah Tamince founded Rixos Hotels in 2000 and won the Tersane Istanbul concession with his Sembol İnşaat group in 2013.

The Rixos isn’t just one of several hotels going into the masterplan; it’s the anchor Tamince controls end-to-end and the engine driving the residential sales attached to it.

The Rixos Tersane Istanbul opened with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan cutting the red ribbon. The property includes 432 rooms, 67 suites, a 2,027-square-meter ballroom, the Velena Food Market, Josephine restaurant, and Vinose wine bar.

Tabanlıoğlu Architects designed the building, the same practice that shaped the broader Tersane masterplan. The hotel operates as a flagship property for the Rixos chain under Ennismore and doubles as the live sales gallery for the attached three-wing residential tower.

The Rixos Tersane Istanbul Residences market a projected seven percent guaranteed USD return over five years, a projected seventy percent return on purchase price within ten years, and leasehold rights extending through 2067.

This is probably the coolest hotel project in the Istanbul luxury market right now. Aliée Istanbul, Paris Society Collection’s first international hotel under Ennismore, opened in 2025, with Aliée Lofts running a similar architecture. Delano Istanbul and Orient Express Istanbul round out the four hotels Tamince has confirmed for the masterplan. But the Rixos does most of the work. Its residences carry the bulk of the off-plan luxury inventory reaching the international broker network: Whitewill in Dubai, CCT Investments, Karas Group, MBany, and Bosphorus Brokers, which market the residences in multiple languages to international buyers.

The buyer profile reads consistently across these brokers: Gulf-based HNWIs, Iranian and Persian-language buyers in select markets, and an average ticket between $750,000 and more than $2 million. Purchase decisions often happen within days rather than weeks once brokers circulate marketing imagery and brand films. More than any other product in the Tersane masterplan, the Rixos residence imagery is what those buyers see first.

For seventeen interior images and a two-minute brand film, our team received floor plans, building geometry, and a short style description: upper-tier, clean, with Turkish luxury cues, gold accents, marble, velvet, and patterned rugs, calibrated for buyers who read polished metal, layered textiles, and material warmth as proof of value. That’s a fair reading of the target market for this residence tier. The Rixos Residences aren’t selling to a Western European minimalist sensibility; they’re selling to Gulf and Iranian HNW buyers, and the interior language has to register accordingly.

Everything else was authored in our marketing agency: kitchen finishes, ceiling treatments, the pool, lounge furniture, the gym layout, spa atmosphere, bedroom wood tones, the balcony bar setting, and flower arrangements on the dining table. We worked from a category and a mood and built the property’s visible interior language from there.

The two-minute brand film completes the still package by doing what stills can’t: selling luxury presence rather than composition. Light moving across stone, a curtain shifting, water settling around a drink left poolside, dusk crossing the terrace, the gym filling with end-of-day quiet, the bedroom holding morning light. The buyer isn’t being told what to think; they’re being given an atmosphere to project into. This is how off-plan luxury residential sells today, and it’s why the CGI set and the property film were budgeted and produced as a single creative deliverable.

The seventeen interior stills cover the spaces brokers get asked about first: the entry sequence, living room, kitchen, master bedroom, bathroom, dining setting, two amenity scenes around the indoor and outdoor pools, the gym, spa, lounge, balcony at day, balcony at dusk, and lobby. Each image is doing direct sales work, and each had to survive being viewed on an iPad in a meeting in Sharjah or a sales office on Tverskaya Street.

The animation runs the same playbook at a higher emotional bandwidth: shallow depth of field, slow camera motion, and warm hotel-grade lighting that signals where the buyer is going to drop their suitcase on the first night. Lifestyle detail rather than narrative: the drink beside the swimming pool, the flowers, the balcony seating overlooking the water, the sunset bleed across the terraces near the end. The discipline lies in understanding which emotional register you’re producing for. That distinction separates high-converting brand content from generic listing-page marketing materials.

Dukkan, which provides us with a keyword brief and a category, is asking our agency to build a believable interior in the register the buyer will pay for. That’s not visualization in the traditional sense; it’s brand authoring. The interior of a Rixos Tersane Istanbul residence, as the international real estate market knows it, exists because we built it in software and dressed it in materials that read at the right level of luxury.

When the physical units are completed, they’ll be benchmarked against the marketing images. The built interiors will need to live up to what was sold off-plan, which is the working reality of HNW residential sales right now. Construction is held to the brief the marketing already established.

For any developer planning a mixed-use masterplan with a branded residential component, the operational takeaway is simple. If your interior design is locked, commission a documentary image set. If your interior design isn’t yet finalized, find a partner who can author the brand-coherent interior language inside the marketing imagery, then specify the build to match. The reverse order, build first, image later, costs you a pre-completion sales window. The Rixos sold what we showed.