About Bahar...
Bahar had a thing for beautiful buildings and structures ever since she was a small girl. When she was five, her parents took her to Sardes in Turkey. In awe of the magnificent Roman bath with a gleaming mosaic courtyard and a huge marble fountain, she told her dad she wanted to be an archeologist -- just so that she could keep on discovering and marveling at the beauty of structures built in antiquity. She realized at that age that people no longer "built" like the Romans did. When Bahar grew up a bit, her family started spending summers on the island of Buyukada, a small gem of an island off the coast of Istanbul beaded with magnificent Ottoman and Greek mansions, many of which were abandoned. She had her eye on one particular mansion and dreamed that one day she would buy it and return it to its former glory...
But life got in the way...and Bahar found herself working on Wall Street instead of Ottoman and Roman buildings. She worked as an investment banker for Salomon Brothers in New York City and later as a venture capital investor in London for The Carlyle Group. When Bahar's son was two years old, she moved into a fixer-upper loft in Tribeca and hired a contractor to fix it up. But life has a funny way of coming in full circle. The contractor went bankrupt. So Bahar took on the responsibility of managing the renovation herself and put the contractors' employees on her payroll. She bought all the materials herself from C joists to hangers to door jambs to paint to marble. And she loved it...But more importantly her loft turned out to be beautiful. And that is how Bahar got into the development and general contracting business. Bahar loves to express her passion for life and beauty through her photography and stories, which you can see here: www.baharkural.com She still dreams of buying that old abandoned Greek mansion of her childhood dreams, fixit it up and decorating its walls with her own photography...
Bahar has a dual degree in economics and political science from Swarthmore College and an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School. She is a graduate of Robert College of Istanbul, a 7 year preparatory lycée on the hills of Bosphorous founded in 1863, the oldest American school outside the United States.