OUR STORY

They say when one family member leaves the village and another returns to it, great things are bound to happen. Hakoni's story started just like that. We can only hope it turns out just as great as it's anticipated!

The reality of the Hakoni House began about 50+ years ago when Osman Terzi, the co-founder of Hakoni Life Inc., started dreaming about building his own house in Gürsu Village where he was born and raised. After he left the village, he completed his education in civil engineering and worked around the world for many years. In 2017, he started building his dream house in the village. During the making of the house, his daughter, Selen Terzi, co-founder and CEO of Hakoni Life Inc., started dreaming about turning the House into a guest house. After the house was finished in 2019, the entire family became involved in the dream of turning the House into a cultural hub and invest in local tourism. And 2 years later, Hakoni House was created.

Hakoni House is a family-run establishment, currently providing 12 fully equipped rooms for its guests. We are open all seasons throughout the year. We provide breakfast (included in the room rate), à la carte lunch, and full course dinner at a fixed rate; all vegetarian friendly world cuisine. We serve meals only to our guests out of respect for our guests' privacy during their stay with us. Our primary goal here at the House is to make our guests feel like they've come to their second home in the mountains. We strive to show our sincerity through our hospitality.

We believe food consumption has a big role in our relationship with nature and we prefer to keep that relationship respectful and fair. That's why we try our best to shop locally, mostly from farmers in the neighborhood for our dairy and vegetable products in order to support and advocate more ethical, sustainable and healthier food choices. We are a meat-free establishment, except for when we serve fish products, according to season.

(adj.) ha | ko | n i
from here. native to the land.

in Laz language.

OUR VISION & MISSION

Here at Hakoni House, we aim to promote localism and sustainability in all aspects of travel; whether it be hospitality, tourism or culinary arts. As the name Hakoni suggests, our family has been in the area for a long time, inheriting the 'Laz' language, culture and its traditions. So we put great emphasis on localism regarding our business practices. But we prefer to approach the concept of the 'local' from a progressive angle. Our vision is to bring the global and the local together to make space for everyone, including our guests, staff members, suppliers and fellow neighbours.

In our daily lives, we are so busy with work, family and other responsibilities that we tend to forget that our physical bodies and emotional beings can go out of synch with the natural order. When we finally realize our imbalance, our first instinct is usually to get away from it, to get out of our head, to travel and live in an alternate world even for a brief period. And when we travel, we create this travel persona to go with our new state of being. Now, all of this is great and natural, but sometimes, we face one problem: we usually separate our two personalities and put our travel persona to rest when we go back home. And we continue to live in this loop where we see travel only as means of escaping from our 'reality.'

We, as Hakoni, simply oppose this status quo. We believe in merging these two personalities together because in the end, they are both 'real,' and they affect and shape each other. We want our guests to dive into their travel selves and carry over whatever they can when they go back home to their routines. We hope to accomplish this by integrating our sustainability practices with your travel expectations.