Between 1938 and 1947, the Viennese architect Clemens Holzmeister lived and worked in Istanbul Tarabya at Sümer Otel, formerly the Summer Palace Hotel. Tarabya is a historic district of Istanbul and is located on the European shore of the Bosphorus. Tarabya was the location of the German embassy’s summer residence and of a military cemetery from 1880. The Summer Palace Hotel opened nearby in 1893/94 (sometimes 1883 is given as the year), mainly accommodating travellers on the Orient Express from May to October. The Summer Palace Hotel was a sister hotel of the Pera Palas Hotel in Beyoğlu, which was located near Sirkeci Station – the terminus of the Orient Express. The Summer Palace Hotel had 110 rooms, was electrified, luxuriously equipped with tennis courts and boasted a spacious terrace with a water view (Akçura 2013). The writer Karl May, for example, stayed here on his journey to Egypt and Ceylon in 1900. After the First World War, the Summer Palace Hotel was acquired by Mıgırdıç Tokatliyan, who already owned the Grand Hotel Tokatliyan in Grande Rue de Péra (Istiklal Caddesi). Later, the hotel name was changed to Sümer Otel. In the early 1950s, the hotel was demolished and the residential complex Sümer Site was built.

Clemens Holzmeister had already been present in Turkey since 1927, mainly employed on ministerial building projects in Ankara, but the so-called “Anschluss” of Austria to National Socialist Germany drove him into political exile. From 1938 onwards he lived and worked in the Sümer Otel in Tarabya, where he probably occupied a floor or several rooms with his family and also ran his architectural office. Many of Holzmeister’s drawings and watercolours of the Sümer Otel and the Tarabya landscape have been preserved and show how this place was a focal point of the architect's life for many years. From here he supervised several projects in Istanbul and Ankara during the period from 1938 to 1947. These included the long-term project of the parliament in Ankara – Holzmeister had won the competition in 1937; the construction period was to last until 1963. In addition, he submitted proposals for the Atatürk Mausoleum in Ankara and the TH Ankara. He provided stage designs for the opera and theatre director Carl Ebert, who taught in Ankara, and developed an ideal theatre together with him. The Eckert-Rifki Villa designed by Holzmeister was built in Istanbul. Above all, however, the architect taught at the newly founded architecture faculty of the Istanbul Technical University from 1940 to 1947. His colleagues were the architects Emin Onat and Paul Bonatz, as well as the urban planner Gustav Oelsner.

Holzmeister’s studio in Tarabya is still remarkable for political reasons. The studio and working group, described by Holzmeister as an “island of peace” (Holzmeister 1976, 110), attracted many architects. Herbert Eichholzer, Ines Viktoria Maier, Hans Pfister, Fritz Reichl and Stephan Simony worked for Holzmeister; Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky also worked there at times. On the basis of correspondence between Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who had been imprisoned in Vienna since 1941, and her husband Wilhelm Schütte, Thomas Flierl was able to show that Clemens Holzmeister's studio in Tarabya became a nucleus for resistance against the Nazis (Flierl 2021, 478–480). Holzmeister himself was not a communist and until his exile was a supporter of the authoritarian, Austrofascist Ständestaat under Engelbert Dollfuß and Kurt Schuschnigg. Nevertheless, a resistance group of the KPÖ (Communist Party of Austria) was able to emerge in his immediate vicinity, and presumably tolerated or overlooked by him (Sümer Otel had a lot of rooms, moreover Holzmeister was abroad in 1938–1940).
In 1947, Holzmeister finally moved to Ankara to supervise the construction of the parliament more closely, and subsequently commuted between the Turkish capital and Vienna.