C’est une merveille!” exclaimed the King of Belgium in 1911 when he and his consort entered the main hall of the Heliopolis Palace Hotel. The royal couple spent an entire month there while Queen Elizabeth recuperated from typhoid fever. The dry air of Heliopolis had been strongly recommended by her doctors in Brussels.

The estate had barely begun its illustrious history of hosting royalty and top leadership that has since culminated in its current status as Egypt’s main presidential residence.

Like Heliopolis itself, the grandiose Palace Hotel rose out of the desert wastes in 1908-10. At a time when lengthy sojourns in Egypt were a social ritual of the European elite, the hotel’s register resembled a leaf out of Burke’s Peerage. Its first proprietor was Monsieur Marquet, and its inaugural director was a Herr Doerhoefer who had previously managed the Mena House. The hotel’s first food and beverage manager was Monsieur Bedard, assisted by Chef Gouin, both from the celebrated Paillard Restaurant in Paris.

On December 1, 1910, all four were on hand to greet Egypt’s best as they celebrated the official launch of the continent’s most luxurious hotel. Conceived by Belgian architect Ernest Jaspar, the hotel boasted 400 rooms, including 55 private apartments. Its banquet halls were among the biggest anywhere. The utilities were the most modern of their day. All had been constructed and put together by the contracting firms Leon Rolin & Co. and Padova, Dentamaro & Ferro, the two biggest civil contractors this side of the Mediterranean. Messrs. Siemens & Schuepert of Berlin fitted the hotel’s web of electric cables and installations.

Another king of sorts was so taken by this desert Taj Mahal that his wife (before she died in 1915), urged him to build her a hotel in Pennsylvania, USA, “like the great Heliopolis Hotel in Cairo.” An agreeable Milton S. Hershey contacted architect Ernest Jaspar and arranged to purchase his plans. But when it was estimated that the cost of duplicating the structure would reach $5 million, America’s chocolate king abandoned the idea, opting for a smaller structure.

A regular visitor to Egypt of that period, who similarly couldn’t believe his eyes upon visiting Heliopolis, was John Pierpont Morgan. Never before had the legendary tycoon seen architectural cross-fertilization of such magnitude. The combined effect of style, accoutrements and scale was so fantastic that he exclaimed in zest that the Heliopolis Company directors should be arrested for having conceived such a mind-boggling endeavor.

Samir Raafat An image of the stately Heliopolis Palace Hotel on an antique postcard.

As though intentional, the hotel’s severe, almost forbidding exterior contrasted sharply with the sumptuousness of the interior. A 1912 visitor recounts how beyond the reception offices “are two lavishly decorated rooms, in the Louis XIV and Louis XV styles respectively, and then comes the central hall, which is a dream of beauty and symmetry.”

It was in the interior design that the splendor of the Palace Hotel reached its artistic zenith.

“From every nook and cranny hang, suspended like stalactite pendants, Damascus-made Oriental lamps of fantastic loveliness,” the visitor gushed. “Above soars the dome rising upward in a bold scheme of frolicsome fancy with all the involved convulsions of Oriental ornamentation. No photograph or description could do justice to the wondrous and elusive loveliness of the scene, which is baffling to the language as it is to the lens.”

The Heliopolis Palace Hotel’s main dome, so awe inspiring to kings and tycoons alike, measured 55 meters from floor to ceiling. The 589 square meter hall, designed by Alexander Marcel of the French Institute and decorated by Georges-Louis Claude, was carpeted with the finest Oriental rugs and fitted with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, draperies and a large marble fireplace. Twenty-two Italian marble columns connected the parquet to the ceiling. To one side of the hall there was the grillroom, which seated 150 guests, and to the other was the billiard hall with two full-sized Thurston tables, as well as a priceless French one.

The mahogany furniture was ordered from Maple’s of London. The upper gallery contained oak-paneled reading and card rooms furnished by Krieger of Paris. The basement and staff area was so large that a narrow gauge railway was installed running the length of the hotel, passing by offices, kitchens, pantries, refrigerators, storerooms and the staff mess.

With these titanic arrangements and facilities, it was natural that international conferences, mega-weddings and royal honeymoons took place at the gargantuan hotel by the desert, as did the landmark apres courses celebrations the races at the nearby Heliopolis Sporting Club were second to none.

During the Great War, the Heliopolis Palace was requisitioned and turned into a British military hospital to nurture wounded coming off the Levantine front. In the Second World War, the hotel was again transformed into a hospital, but also hosted British and Dominion officers. A flying control officer at Aircraft Safety Center Egypt (ASCE) sent his regards when the fighting was through.

“What a magnificent building that was!” he wrote. “My office was in one of the hotel’s rooms. We were billeted out at various pensions in the surrounding streets, eating at nearby cafes. Thank you, Egypt, for your hospitality.”

If during the war foreign troops on R&R (rest and recreation) represented the largest single category of tourists to visit Egypt, in its aftermath air travel would rapidly change travel patterns the world over. Henceforth, the average tourist stay would be reduced from several weeks to a few days. Mass travel and holiday packages were ushering in the era of the camera-clicking crowds. As tourism became a mega-industry in the booming 1950s, new vertical hotels were cropping up along the Nile their, interiors calculated on the basis of return per square meter.

Unable to compete, the Heliopolis Palace was becoming a dinosaur.

In the 1960s, the abandoned hotel was the unwitting home to various government departments and, in January 1972, the sorry headquarters of a stillborn political union between Libya, Egypt and Syria (Federation of Arab Republics FAR), hence the current name of Kasr Al-Ittihadiya (Unity Palace). One by one, an untutored public and several dubious state organizations chipped its inimitable artifacts away.

It was all over. The dustbin of history was lurking behind the hotel’s derelict pillars; perhaps the bulldozer and a demolition ball were not far behind. We shall never know.

But whether by divine or temporal intervention, the Palace Hotel was granted a new lease on life. Situated within earshot of where Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak lives, the former hotel was given a thorough face-lift in the 1980s and declared the headquarters of the new presidential administration once again, the Taj Mahal of the desert is used for a purpose its elegance and stature demand. et