Manial Palace

A palace complex on Roda Island that behaves less like a residence than like a private museum of architecture. Prince Mohammed Ali Tawfiq built five separate buildings in the same garden, each in a different style, apparently because he wanted them all.

The buildings

• The Reception Palace — Ottoman and Moorish, with tiled halls and a Syrian-style room lifted from Damascus
• The Residence, whose interiors run from Turkish to Rococo, room by room
• The Private Mosque, small and intensely tiled
• The Throne Hall, hung with royal portraits
• The Hunting Museum — thousands of mounted trophies, including a table made from elephant ears. It is a lot, and not for everyone

The garden

Often the best part. The prince planted rare species from around the world — banyans, palms, tropical trees — and the grounds are shaded, quiet and almost empty of visitors, which in central Cairo is worth something on its own.

Mohammed Ali Tawfiq was a grandson of Khedive Ismail, and he built here between roughly 1899 and 1929. He was twice heir presumptive to the Egyptian throne and never took it: first displaced when his brother Abbas II had a son, and later passed over again during the reign of his cousin Farouk, for whom he served as regent when Farouk was still a minor.

He spent the intervening decades as a collector, a horseman and a patron of Islamic art, and the palace is essentially the product of a very rich man with excellent taste, no throne, and time.

Why so many styles

The eclecticism was fashionable and also pointed. Egyptian royalty of the period was consciously assembling an identity from Ottoman, Arab, Persian and European sources, and the palace stages that argument in built form — a Damascene room next to a French salon next to an Andalusian courtyard, all belonging to the same household.

He was an unusually serious collector, and much of the tilework, woodwork and manuscript material was bought from older buildings and installed here, which makes parts of the palace a rescue collection as much as a decorative scheme.

Given away

The prince left the palace and everything in it to the Egyptian state, and it opened to the public after the 1952 revolution. It closed for a long restoration and reopened in the 2010s.