The gentlest room in Istanbul

At the centre of every Turkish hammam is a raised slab of marble called the göbek taşı - the navel stone. It sits beneath the dome, warmed from below, and the whole room arranges itself around it. Light falls through small glass openings in the dome above. You lie on the stone until the heat has gone all the way through you, and then a little longer.

I went to two of them in Istanbul - the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, up on its hill above the Golden Horn, and the Kılıç Ali Paşa in Tophane - expecting the things I had read about: the domes, the worn marble, the vigorous scrub of the kese mitt that leaves you feeling newly made. All of it was there. But it is not what I brought home.

What I brought home was the tenderness.

Men and women bathe separately, each attended by their own, and the side I saw was an entirely male world: men attending to men under a single dome, wrapped in the thin checked cotton of the peştamal. The attendants, the tellak, do the work. And I watched them do it with a kind of care I have rarely seen between men anywhere else. A man rising from the slab, unsteady from the heat, and the tellak taking his hand - not gripping it, holding it - and waiting while he found his feet. Towelling him dry, slowly and thoroughly: shoulders, back, the backs of the legs. Then the cream worked into the skin, with unhurried attention.

It is their job, of course. But a job can be done briskly, and this was not. And the men on the receiving end simply let themselves be looked after. No one made a joke of it. No one looked away. Nobody seemed to feel the need to explain it.

That was the part that stayed with me. We carry a fairly narrow idea of how men are permitted to touch one another - the handshake, the back-slap, the brief hug with a thump at the end to make sure everyone knows it's over. Gentleness between men tends to be either hidden or excused. Here it was neither. It was simply how the room worked.

The hammam has been doing this for a long time. It descends from the Roman bath, and under the Ottomans it became one of the great civic institutions of the city, built alongside the mosques by the same architects. Both of the hammams I visited are the work of Sinan, the greatest of them, and both have been carefully restored in recent years. Men went before Friday prayers; grooms went on the eve of their weddings. It was where you were cleaned, but also where you were looked after. The care I witnessed was not a modern softening of an old tradition. It was the tradition.

I have stood in a great many beautiful buildings. Few of them taught me anything about how to behave. This one did. It is possible - it has always been possible - for men to be gentle with one another in plain sight, without ceremony and without apology. It only takes a room that expects it.

I came home wanting to keep a little of that room – not the dome or the marble, but the unhurried attention. A cream worked into the skin rather than rushed. A shave that takes as long as it takes. It is the same patience behind our body and grooming collection: aftershave milks from Antica Barbieria Colla, the Milanese barbershop that has been looking after men since 1904, C.Atherley’s geranium creams, and Bridie Hall’s soaps cast with classical reliefs.