Tersane Istanbul

A $1.346 Billion Bet on the Golden Horn

On the Golden Horn

In 2013, Sembol İnşaat group won a 49-year build-operate-transfer concession for 242,000 square meters of the Tersâne-i Âmire, Mehmed II’s Imperial Shipyard, established in the mid-15th century after the conquest, the site that built Ottoman naval vessels for nearly 600 years.

A partially decommissioned industrial waterfront sits between Beyoğlu and the postcard view across the Golden Horn toward Süleymaniye, Galata Tower, and the historic peninsula.

The masterplan reads like a city in itself: four hotels with roughly 1,100 keys, 660 branded residences, 27 listed heritage buildings preserved and adapted, three museums, and two marinas with 280-yacht capacity.

The architects behind Tersane

Foster + Partners revealed the design for the Golden Horn Plaza retail pavilion in August 2025. Tabanlıoğlu Architects shaped the masterplan and designed the Rixos hotel. DP Architects Singapore worked across three of the seven zones. Grimshaw delivered the new Sadberk Hanım Museum for the Vehbi Koç Foundation. 1508 London handled residential interiors visible to buyers in Dubai and Doha.

Heritage is an asset

By the time the brief came from Dukkan to develop content for marketing, construction was already underway, and the Rixos was in advanced structural stages.

What didn’t yet exist were the images and films of what life inside the finished district would look like. The marketing CGIs and brand film had to bridge that gap, carrying the project until the buildings caught up.

Heritage becomes an asset when the narrative around it is controlled. Sembol and Dukkan needed a real estate brand capable of operating across nine languages, spanning the Gulf, Russian-speaking markets, and Iran.

Selling residences and hotel keys

In the $750,000 to $2 million-plus residential segment, buyers in Doha or Dubai decide based on what reaches their phone, their broker’s WhatsApp, and the booth at MIPIM.

If the visual product is strong, sales cycles compress and margins hold. Savills research on branded residences consistently highlights a price premium of roughly 30% over comparable unbranded developments, driven by perceived quality, services, and brand association. Before completion, much of that premium exists in the marketing.

Selling 660 residences, 1,100 hotel keys, 270 retail units, three museums, and two marinas as a single coherent district required every angle of the masterplan to be visualized: aerials, eye-level views, panoramas, terraces.

Each parcel needed representation from multiple directions. Stock crowd assets or a single hero shot of the Rixos tower would not be enough. Buyers read surrounding context to assess whether a district will genuinely function.

A believable contemporary district

The masterbrand had to treat heritage credibly: the restored cranes, Valide Slipway, Aynalıkavak Pavilion, Foundry, Hammerhouse, and the Torpedo Factory, now operating as a Nike flagship store. Authority of that kind only comes from imagery where heritage assets are accurately represented and integrated into a believable contemporary district.

The Rixos opening on September 1, 2024, presented by President Erdoğan, functioned as a soft launch. Aliée Istanbul, Paris Society Collection’s first international hotel under Ennismore, opened in 2025. Contemporary Istanbul has anchored on-site since 2021, marking the first time a major international art fair operated inside a live construction zone in Türkiye. Each milestone required completed luxury property content.

Constructing the layered atmosphere

Across the project, thirty exterior and aerial images covering the masterplan were produced, alongside a 16K cinemagraph for large-scale projection at a real estate trade event.

Every building in Tersane was covered from all buyer-relevant angles. The scale of production is not what most developers expect. The architectural models delivered by contributing studios provided building geometries, but little else. No streetscape, paving, lighting strategy, or furniture. The task was to construct the layered atmosphere that makes a place feel real and investable.

A 30-image CGI set

This is what separates marketing imagery from brochure visualization. It is also where developers often cut corners and under-invest. A thirty-image CGI set for a 242,000-square-meter masterplan cannot rely on simplified logic. Every aerial must connect to another image where its secondary elements become primary. Every eye-level view must resolve into another part of the district at the same level of detail.

Population strategy also mattered. The brief required a transnational HNW reading: cosmopolitan, lifestyle-coded, neither overly local nor generic. Minimal visible cars, with parking largely underground and a preference for car-free public realm. Each scene needed population density calibrated to how buyers assess livability.

Before generative AI

The 16K cinemagraph was commissioned for large-scale projection at a real estate trade event, part of the broader Turkish industry presence at MIPIM Cannes where Tersane appeared alongside Galataport, Emlak Konut, IFM, Halk GYO, and Kalyon under the “Istanbul Talks” program.

At 16K resolution on a wide projection wall, every plant, reflection, and surface detail had to hold the fidelity of a standalone hero image. It was produced entirely using traditional CGI, before current generative AI workflows.

By the Rixos opening in September 2024, Tersane was already operating internationally as a recognizable address. Whitewill in Dubai, CCT Investments, Karas Group, MBany Real Estate, Bosphorus Brokers, and Luxury Signature were all marketing the project in localized formats across multiple languages.

Investing in image volume

Most developers treat marketing imagery as a cost center: the minimum required to support a brochure, produced late in the design process, then pushed into broker activation. Tersane took the opposite approach. Dukkan and Sembol invested in image volume and visual authority early, treating the visual system as inventory.

That decision is not visible in budget lines. It shows up in absorption rates, pricing stability, and broker confidence during pre-sale.

Tersane’s authority does not come from a single hero shot. It comes from coverage: every angle of a 242,000-square-meter district rendered to the same standard, enabling broker confidence, international presentation at events like MIPIM, and multilingual sales activation across continents.