A few kilometres from the historic centre of Istanbul is the former fishing village of Bebek, where the prosperous elite of Kemalist Turkey built villas whose floor plans and occasionally also their external forms were positioned as progressive. This is particularly true of the residency designed by the Swiss-Austrian architect Ernst Egli for the engineer Ragıp Devres in Istanbul Bebek, which left its mark on the Turkish villa landscape. With its wraparound balconies, steel columns, flat roof and panoramic windows, the house follows the parameters of international architectural modernity and thus differs from the classic Turkish residential building.
The break with tradition is also evident in the interior design of the building and the organisation of life inside it. In the classic Ottoman house, the women lived in the harem while the men lived in the selamlık, the men’s wing and reception area. Only their closest male relatives could enter the women’s quarters, and it was only there that the lady of the house was allowed to receive her guests (Nayman 1936, 510). As early as the end of the 19th century the Ottoman aristocracy and upper classes became increasingly interested in European types of housing and interior design (Gürboğa 2003, 62), but it was primarily after 1923 that a radical societal change and reform of housing took place. The floor plan of the Ragip Devres House consists of two rectangles nested inside each other, with all plumbing units and private rooms situated in the recessed wing and a single, prestigious salon for social gatherings which opens on to the garden occupying the other half. The planning of the parents’ bedroom and separate children’s rooms on the top floor was a concession to European living arrangements. At the request of the clients, Egli was also responsible for the garden architecture and the interior furnishings (Egli 1969, 51). In the dark wall panelling, built-in wardrobes and buffets there are visible references to Viennese interiors like that of the Moller House by Adolf Loos, built in 1928. A European style of residence and furnishings became the expression of a lifestyle that was the antithesis of that of an Ottoman house (Ernst Egli, in: Meier 1941, 1240). The architecture historian Oya Atalay Franck named the Ragıp Devres Villa the “poetic masterwork” (Franck 2012, 134).  

Just a few years after the Ragip Devres Villa was built, the emigré biologists Leonore Kosswig and her husband Curt Kosswig also moved into a house in the suburb of Bebek (Inşirah Sokak No. 32), as did the philologist Erich Auerbach (Arslanlı Konak), the orientalist Hellmut Ritter (Inşirah Sokak No. 34) and with him his close friend, the philologist and painter Traugott Fuchs.

Egli, who came to Turkey in 1927, was responsible for many ministry and government buildings in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey from 1923, and also left traces in Istanbul. He was a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul (1930–1936) and designed the Botanical Institute buildings, which for many years formed part of the Alfred Heilbronn Botanical Garden. Egli left Turkey in 1940, but returned in 1953–1956, working on behalf of the United Nations, and continued to work on Turkish topics, publishing his book on the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, Sinan Baumeister osmanischer Glanzzeit (Stuttgart: Erlenbach) in 1954.