English has three terms: house management, estate management and residence governance. All three are defined, all three are professions in their own right, and all three carry a body of training and a career path.
Turkish has no exact equivalent for any of them. This is not a translation problem. A translation problem is when the concept exists and the word cannot be found. Here the situation is the reverse: the work is being done, the word is missing — and because the word is missing, the work is invisible.
The trail of the word
Every language that has produced a serious culture of the household has produced a word for the person who runs it.
The English steward descends from Old English stigweard: stig, the house or hall, and weard, the guardian. The keeper of the house. Majordomo comes from the Latin major domus — the head of the household. Estate reaches back to the Latin status by way of Old French estat: standing, position, and in time the property that carried the standing.
Turkish had its word too. Kâhya comes from the Persian kadḫudā: kad, the house, and ḫudā, the lord or master. The master of the house. Kethüda is the same word in its formal, chancery spelling; kâhya is the shape it wore down to in everyday speech. The difference between them is not a difference of meaning but of register — the same distance that separates hâne from ev, the learned Ottoman word for the household from the plain word for home.
And kethüda was not the name of a servant. It was the name of an office.
The hane kethüdası — the kethüda of the household — was responsible for the running of a great konak, the Ottoman mansion: staff, provisioning, upkeep, the order of guests, the accounts. As close to a one-to-one counterpart of the English steward as the language ever produced.
The lonca kethüdası, the guild kethüda, is the more interesting of the two. He stood at the head of a craftsmen’s guild, was elected by its members, and answered for the guild’s standard of quality, its price discipline and its professional conduct. A person, in other words, who embodied the standard of a profession and stood behind it.
That description should sound familiar. It is precisely the essence of what we now call residence governance: a recognized authority that defines the standard of the work, inspects it, and answers for it.
What was lost
Then the word decayed. To say kâhya in Turkish today is to risk satire. The word fell from office to servitude, and from servitude to a term of mockery.
But the essential point is this: the word did not fall on its own.
The kethüda was an institution — behind it stood a guild, a membership, an election, a standard, an obligation to account. When that institution was dissolved, the ground beneath the word went with it. What remained was a hollowed word, and hollow words fall fast.
Turkish did not lose a word. It lost the institution behind the word. The word simply fell with it.
What the language offers today does not describe the work:
House manager — ev yöneticisi — is read as the administrator of an apartment building. A different job entirely.
Complex and facility management — site yönetimi / tesis yönetimi — govern the common areas. They stop at the front door.
Property management — mülk yönetimi — is built around rental yield. It manages the asset that earns, not the home that is lived in.
Real-estate management — emlak yönetimi — is brokerage: buying and selling.
All four terms exist, and all four point at the wrong place. A profession that cannot describe itself has its fee, its status and its continuity decided by that failure — directly.
I will not insist on the word
Anyone who has read this far can guess the expected next move: bring kethüda back.
I will not. And I want to say so plainly, because if this essay turns into nostalgia it loses its value.
The word is precious as a historical record — it shows that this function was not invented elsewhere; it existed on this soil and had an institutional counterpart. It cannot carry more than that. To use kethüda as a title today would not establish the profession as a contemporary category; it would dress it in period costume. To stand before an international homeowner, a family office or a branded-residence operator with that word is to accept, in advance, not being understood.
What was lost was not the word. It was the function. And what must be rebuilt is not the word. It is the function.
That is why I use house management, estate management and residence governance as they are. I do not translate them, because every attempted translation deforms the concept — and a deformed definition is more harmful than none. As the terms settle, their Turkish counterparts will form of their own accord. That is the order of events, not the reverse.
Three terms, three layers
House Management
The daily operation of a single home. Staff, shifts, procurement, cleaning standards, maintenance routines, guest readiness, inventory, vendor coordination.
The house manager is on site, inside the house — knowing what happens today, what is done this week, what must be ready when the guests arrive on Friday. The unit of measure is the day.
Estate Management
Wider. One or more properties, land, several structures, a larger team, budget responsibility, renovation and investment projects, security, sometimes boats and a fleet of vehicles.
The estate manager sits above the house managers. The role descends from the land agents and stewards of the English estate tradition: the person who manages on the owner’s behalf, renders account, and carries signing authority. The unit of measure is the season, the year.
Residence Governance
The third is different in kind. House and estate management are the operating layer. Governance is the accountability layer, and it stands on the owner’s side.
Defined standards. Documented knowledge. Vendors under control. Preventive routines. Independent reporting.
Management runs the house. Governance makes that running visible, verifiable and transferable.
A single question reveals which of these a residence has: in the current arrangement, who is obliged to tell the owner what the operator would prefer left unsaid?
If the answer is “no one”, the house has management — and no governance.
Let me be honest: the first two are established professional categories in the Anglo-American world. The third is not yet established to the same degree. Residence governance is the layer I am arguing for — and it is the reason this essay exists.
In Turkey, the work is already being done
In Bodrum, in Çeşme, in Göcek, on both shores of the Bosphorus, there are houses whose owners spend most of the year in another country — and the houses stand. The pool chemistry holds, the generator runs, the house is ready when guests arrive, damp does not settle in over the winter.
There are people who make this happen. Most of them do it in a role that has never been named, with a responsibility whose definition has never been written, and with nothing resembling a career ever promised.
The category exists. It is not consolidated.
Unconsolidated means: no common standard, no written body of practice, no name for the profession, no training path attached to the name — and therefore no shared language in which to explain to an owner the difference between someone who does this work well and someone who does it passably. Everyone runs their own house by their own method, on their own memory. When that person leaves, the house loses its memory.
The breaking point: branded residences
What changed this picture was the arrival of branded residences.
A branded residence sells a promise at the moment of purchase: this place will be operated to a defined standard. The promise is not about build quality; it is about operation. And the moment handover takes place, a precise question surfaces — after handover, who operates the home?
For the common areas the answer is settled; site and facility management exist. The residence brand brings its own service layer. But none of these is answerable for the home inside the front door. The home’s own maintenance, its own inventory, its own staff, its own vendors, its own risk items, its own memory. That space is empty.
In Turkey the space is filled by a person the owner trusts. Sometimes the architect, sometimes a former hotelier, sometimes a family friend, sometimes the most senior person working there. The solution works — for as long as that person is there. It is carried by the person, not the structure. When the person goes, the structure goes with them.
What founds a category is the replacement of the person-dependent solution with a transferable standard. Which is exactly what the guild kethüda once did: he separated the standard from the person and bound it to an institution.
Institutional culture and the values of the profession
The technical side of this work can be taught. Pool chemistry can be learned, electrical safety can be learned, a preventive-maintenance calendar can be built, a vendor contract can be written. The hard part is not technical.
The hard part is the profession’s set of values:
Silence. Good service is invisible; what is felt is its result, not its performance. The employee does not try to show that work is being done.
Privacy. The owner, the family, the guests and the inner order of the house are not discussed outside it. No photographs, no video, no location sharing — and permission is not even asked.
Accountability. Mistakes, omissions, damage, delays and risks are not concealed. They are reported on time, to the right person. This is the most expensive clause in the culture, because it is the first to be sacrificed under pressure.
Continuity. Every object, key, document and piece of equipment has a defined place. Nothing goes unwritten, because whatever is unwritten leaves with the person.
Representation. Every contact with a vendor, a facility team or a third party represents the owner. Calm, measured, oriented to solutions.
These are not fine sentiments. They are the skeleton of a profession. Law, medicine and seamanship were built on skeletons of the same kind — first there were people doing the work, then they described what they did, and then the description became something that could be handed on.
The invitation
This is the real reason for the essay.
As this category is built, I am inviting the people who carry it to gather. House managers; operations people who came out of hotels; those who rose through the technical and facilities side; people who have worked in a single house for years and know it by heart.
Here is a bold sentence: there are hundreds of qualified people doing this work in this country, and not one of them belongs to a profession with a name. I cannot put that name in place alone. A standard is not written in a single office; until it is validated by the people doing the work in the field, it remains a written wish.
What I am extending is not a job advertisement. It is an invitation into a framework — to harden the checklists, the inspection discipline, the reporting language and the vendor standards together, and then to apply them in the house you run. Every qualified person the category gains adds to its weight in front of the owner. This is not a zero-sum game.
An instrument in the age of AI
The last point, and the one most open to misreading.
Software is carrying this work forward, and it is valuable. When the inspection record is kept digitally, it becomes comparable. The maintenance calendar reminds. The inventory can be searched. The report takes five minutes instead of an hour. Artificial intelligence releases the house’s memory, accumulated over years, from the limits of one person’s recall. All of this is real gain.
But software is an instrument. The instrument does not write the music.
Someone still has to notice the change in the colour of the pool, sense the illogic in a vendor’s price, feel what is missing in the house before the guests arrive, and give the owner bad news at the right time and in the right tone. That is judgment, and it requires standing in the field.
Automation does not abolish this profession. It does the opposite: by absorbing the routine, it makes what remains — judgment, representation, trust — more visible and more valuable.
Closing
On this soil there was once an office that answered for the running of a house. There was an office that answered for the standard of a profession. Both were institutions; both were dissolved; and what remained was a fallen word.
I do not want the word back. I want the function.
A profession is being founded — not because it is new, but because it was founded once and then abandoned. Its name, for now, is English. Its borders are not yet drawn, its training path does not yet exist, its standard is still being written.
And joining a profession while it is being built is always worth more than joining one that is finished.
Hikmet Ertangün
Standart Consultancy
Where a residence needs this kept day to day — staff, maintenance, readiness and reporting — Standart manages it directly or alongside the team already there: Residence Management →
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