Four Seasons Hotel Istanbul at Sultanahmet

The building went up in 1918 as a neoclassical prison, and the street it sits on — Tevkifhane Sokak, literally "Prison Street" — still carries the name. It held inmates until the 1980s, then sat empty for a decade before Four Seasons converted it into a hotel in 1996, keeping the courtyard layout of the original cell blocks as the garden the restaurant now looks onto.

It's small for a Four Seasons — around 65 rooms — and that's a consequence of the building, not a design choice; there's only so much a former prison can hold once the corridors become hallways with proper ceiling heights. What it buys instead is a location nothing else in the city matches: Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque are both a short walk away, inside the old city walls.

It's a base for seeing Sultanahmet properly rather than a destination in itself — book it for the two or three days that part of the trip needs, then move across the water for the rest.