Gayer-Anderson Museum

Every other monument in Islamic Cairo is a mosque, a tomb or a gate. This is a house, and it is furnished, which makes it the one place where the domestic half of the city becomes legible: where women sat to watch guests they could not join, where a fountain cooled a reception room, how light was handled before glass.

Rooms worth finding

• The qa'a — a double-height reception hall with a marble floor fountain and a mashrabiya gallery above it
• The Persian room, the Damascus room and the Byzantine room, each furnished to a different taste
• The secret cupboard stair the owner used to reach the women's gallery
• The roof terrace, looking straight across at the minaret of Ibn Tulun

It shares a wall with the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, so the two are one visit — the mosque for scale and silence, the house for detail. Sixty minutes covers both rooms and roof. The James Bond sequence in The Spy Who Loved Me was filmed here, which the custodians will tell you before you ask.

Two houses, built in 1632 and 1540, standing back to back and joined by a bridge at first-floor level. The older is known as Bayt al-Kritliyya, the House of the Cretan Woman, after a later resident.

Both were scheduled for demolition in the 1920s when the Egyptian government, having decided they were worth keeping, restored them instead. In 1935 it granted use of the houses to John Gayer-Anderson, a British army doctor and collector, on the condition that his collection stayed in Egypt when he left.

He lived there until 1942, furnishing each room to a theme and installing his own collection of carpets, furniture and pharaonic pieces around it. He kept his side of the bargain: the house passed to the state as a museum with everything in place, which is precisely why it works — almost no other historic Cairo interior survived the twentieth century with its contents.