One of Canberra's leading restaurateurs is planning a property investment that takes a tradition from the city's early days and drags it into the 21st century.
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Serif Kaya and his wife Gulbahar, owners of Barton's Ottoman restaurant, have lodged an application with planning authorities for a boarding house on Franklin Street in upmarket Forrest.
According to the development application, the Kayas want to take advantage of the property's location, a short walk from Parliament House, to offer a ''boutique'' boarding house service.
''The accommodation would be aimed at visiting parliamentarians, journalists, business people, etc, for primarily long-term accommodation,'' the documents say. ''Access to associated services, meal preparation areas, laundry, parking, etc, would be restricted to guests only, with no licence to sell liquor.
''The proposed boarding house intends to blend in as a private residence in the established, leafy setting of the Forrest streetscape.''
Mrs Kaya declined to discuss her family's plans for the site when contacted on Sunday.
Hostels, guesthouses and boarding houses, many of them government-owned, were common in Canberra's early decades, accommodating the workers who poured into the growing capital. By the height of Canberra's hostel era in the early 1950s, as many as one in five Canberrans lived in such accommodation. But by the early 1970s, hostel residents made up just 2 per cent of the population and the rooming house lifestyle has since all but disappeared in the territory.
The ACT government floated the idea three years ago of reviving the hostel era to help those locked out of the city's tough rental market.
But the idea was quietly dropped in 2012 because of a lack of interest from landlords.
But the Kayas' proposal is for a thoroughly modern, two-storey affair with its 20 bedrooms arranged around a courtyard and swimming pool.
''Use of the site for a boarding house will not have a significant adverse impact on the surrounding residential development,'' according to the application documents. The boarding house is conceived as a small, private, low-profile development specifically aimed at providing quiet residential-style accommodation for out-of-town guests.
''Activity of guests will not bring additional noise … to the site.''
