THE RE-OPENING OF THE SHUBRA PAVILION

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Designed in what is loosely termed "late Ottoman" style Shubra Pavilion's external architecture is comparable to palaces and summerhouses found in the European part of the empire including Mohammed Ali's hometown of Kavala in eastern Macedonia.
Marveled by all who visited it during his reign, Mohammed Ali's Shubra Pavilion consists of an artificial marble-lined pool with as a whimsical centerpiece, an elaborate octagonal Carrara marble balustrade fountain-islet sporting marble statuettes. The whole resting atop 24 raised marble crocodiles spraying water out of their menacing jaws.
Surrounding the pool is a raised wide square gallery fronted by mauresque wrap-around veranda with 104 slender load-bearing bronze-based marble colonnades.
Overlooking the pool from the interior of the gallery are 112 low-lying windows with bronze railings.
The gallery built in wood and plaster has four corner salons (diwans or kiosks). As though standing sentinel on these salons are four water-spouting marble lions.
Not unlike the interiors of contemporary palaces built in the Citadel complex including the Bijoux Palace (1814), the Harem Palace built in 1827 (now military museum) and the Daftarkhana (1828), the Shubra palace and its annexes were also a melange of styles ranging from faux oriental to gaudy European.
As though to earmark this cultural cross-pollination each of the four Pavilion salons dons a different flavor as disimilar as the four seasons and as far removed as the four poles.
While one salon has an elaborate wooden ceiling inlaid with gold trimmings and period European decor with reflecting mirrors and semetrically laid-out French empire furniture, another salon was decorated entirely with trompe-oeil murals some of them featuring bucolic Grecian landscapes closed in by corniches and bowed ceilings inlaid with nude paintings.
The use of these salons changed over the years whereby a salamlik turned into a billiard room or a visitor's reception quarter was transformed into a dining room.
Equally to be noted on one of the salon ceiling are its serial medallions with what seems to be mythical Greek characters but are actually members of the Mohammed Ali family. Another marvel is the finest French parquet which, 180 years later, remains matchless . And of-course there is the hallmark of most Egyptian palaces-- the oriental diwan.