About
A studio of one. London and Istanbul. The direct booking studio for independent stays — film, site and evidence.
What is a direct booking studio?
A direct booking studio builds what an independent stay needs to earn bookings on its own site: a film, a booking-focused property site, and monthly evidence running from film view to booking click. It works alongside the stay's existing booking engine; it is not an online travel agency, not a booking engine, and not a marketing retainer. Mahsus is the direct booking studio for independent stays; it works from London and Istanbul, in English and Turkish, and makes the film, the site, and the evidence from the photographs a stay already has.
Joshua Eren Cetindamar
Founder
Based in London. Raised between Istanbul and the United Kingdom. Six years in the short-term rental industry before founding Mahsus — bringing an operator's eye to hospitality marketing.
Mahsus was built from inside a family stays business — Galata apartments where I still work, answering guests and managing listings. Every property around us had paid for photography it barely used; ours had too. So the kit was made there first, and instrumented hardest there, because our own revenue depended on it working. That build is pilot one — run through the full process, and disclosed plainly wherever the work appears as evidence.
Every engagement is brief-to-delivery in one pair of hands. No account manager, no handoff, no team behind the scenes you will never meet. The studio takes three or four engagements at a time, never more — the work asks for it.
Track record
Six years in short-term rental before the studio, and a family stays business we still help run. The operator's eye is the work's eye.
Because the film is built from the photography your house already holds, there is no crew to host, no shoot days to schedule, no rooms taken out of service. The work happens at the studio, not in your lobby.
London · Istanbul
From the founder
“Every property pays for a brand shoot and barely uses it. The photographs age in months; the place keeps evolving. Mahsus exists to put those photographs back into use — without asking the photographer to come back.”
How the studio holds itself
Four commitments
Room rules, written down. The same four lines hold for every engagement.
Credit
Where the photographer holds the rights, every deliverable names them in the end-card and file metadata. Their work is the source — and unless the brand owns the photographs and prefers otherwise, we say so.
Disclosure
Every film is brought into motion from a real image, and we are always clear where that image comes from. Where the place is real, the work stays grounded in its own photography — restored and brought up to 4K in the studio when it needs to be, never made into something it is not. Where a place is not yet built, we say so plainly: a concept is shown as a concept, never as a finished room. Each piece is made with AI-assisted craft, and we disclose it — the honesty is part of the work, not a footnote to it.
Reply
Every brief receives a written reply within two working days, signed by the founder. No ticket queue, no sales sequence.
Restraint
Three or four engagements at a time, never more. Anything more and the work stops being specific. The studio is small on purpose.
Calibration
What we admire
We hold the work against the hospitality brands we admire, the design studios that set the discipline, and the editorial publications we read.
Hospitality
Aman · Soho House · Belmond · The Connaught · The Stay Bosphorus
Design
Pentagram · Studio Freight · Anagrama · Order
Editorial
Cereal · Apartamento · Frame
Ready to write?
Send a brief. The founder reads every one.
Three or four sentences is plenty. A link to your existing site is enough to start. Reply within two working days, signed by Eren.