The Baron Empain Palace

The Baron Empain Palace stands on a corner of al-Uruba Street in Heliopolis, in north-east Cairo, surrounded by a district that it is largely responsible for.

It is a red concrete building of towers, tiered terraces and carved figures, modelled on Hindu and Khmer temple architecture. There is nothing else remotely like it in Egypt.

The building itself is the whole argument. Elephants, serpents, dancing figures and Buddha-like heads climb the terraces; the plan is a stack of shrinking tiers around a central tower. Somebody built a Cambodian temple in a Cairo suburb around 1910 and paid for it out of a tram fortune.

It also explains Heliopolis. Baron Édouard Empain came to Egypt as a railway and tramway financier, bought a stretch of desert north-east of Cairo, and built a whole new garden suburb on it — streets, arcades, a hotel, a basilica and a tram line into the city. The palace was his own house at the centre of the project, and reading the district afterwards is more interesting than reading it before.

And the restoration is genuinely good. The palace stood empty and vandalised for decades, gathering a long local reputation for being haunted, before the state bought it and restored it. It opened to the public in 2020, and the interiors — the stair, the fittings, the roof terrace — are now presented with an exhibition on the history of Heliopolis.

Empain arrived in Egypt in 1904 on a railway concession in the Delta and stayed to found the Cairo Electric Railways and Heliopolis Oases Company, which created the suburb from scratch on desert land and ran the line that connected it to central Cairo.

His group had equipped and operated the first lines of the Paris Métro, and it was his Belgian banking and holding interests that capitalised the new venture. The company put up the Heliopolis Palace Hotel of 1910 — now the presidential palace, Ittihadiya — and built the basilica of Our Lady of Heliopolis, where Empain was buried after his death in 1929.

The palace was designed by the French architect Alexandre Marcel, who worked in a range of borrowed historical styles, and built in the years around 1907 to 1911 in reinforced concrete, which was then a new material.

Marcel also designed the Japanese Tower and the Chinese Pavilion at Laeken in Brussels for King Leopold II. Here he worked from Hindu temple architecture with Angkor in the mix, and had the interiors decorated by the French artist Georges-Louis Claude.

After the family left, the building passed through owners and long vacancy. It became a magnet for ghost stories, urban explorers and rumour, none of which needs to be believed to enjoy the place. The Egyptian state acquired it, restored it over several years, and opened it as a museum in 2020.

• The carved terraces of elephants, serpents and dancing figures
• The central tower and the roof terrace
• The restored interiors and original stair
• The permanent exhibition on the founding of Heliopolis
• The surrounding streets of the original garden suburb
• The tiered silhouette from the garden, each storey stepping back from the one below
• Cast concrete worked to imitate carved temple stone