The Heliopolis Palace Hotel was the centerpiece of a grander ambition. Baron Edouard Empain, through his Heliopolis Oases Company, was building an entirely new suburb in the desert northeast of Cairo. The hotel, designed by Belgian architect Ernest Jaspar from 1908 to 1910, introduced what became known as the Heliopolis style of architecture -- a synthesis of Persian, Moorish Revival, Islamic, and European Neoclassical elements that made the building look as though it had arrived from several centuries and civilizations simultaneously. Siemens of Berlin wired the electrical systems. Two of Egypt's largest contracting firms, Leon Rolin & Co. and Padova, Dentamaro & Ferro, handled the construction. French management ran the operations. The hotel had 400 rooms, including 55 private apartments, a Grillroom seating 150, a billiards hall with British Thurston tables and a reportedly priceless French one, and reading rooms furnished by Krieger of Paris. It was a building assembled from the finest things that money could buy from every corner of Europe and the Middle East.

When World War I broke out, luxury tourism stopped and a different kind of guest arrived. The Heliopolis Palace Hotel was converted into a military hospital for Australian and other Commonwealth troops fighting in the Middle Eastern campaigns. Australian newspapers christened it "the Hospital in a Palace" -- a name that captured the surreal contrast between the gilded interiors and the wounded soldiers filling its halls. Students and nuns from the nearby College du Sacre-Coeur staffed the wards. Ambulances lined the roads outside, and beds and tents stretched for miles beyond the hotel's grounds. It became one of the largest and grandest military hospitals in the entire campaign, capable of treating thousands of patients at a time. The same marble columns that had framed banquets for royalty now watched over rows of recovering soldiers.

The hotel never fully recovered its prewar glamour. In 1958, the Egyptian government purchased the building and closed it to guests. For over two decades it housed government offices, its ballrooms repurposed for bureaucracy. A brief moment of geopolitical ambition came in January 1972, when the building became the headquarters of the Federation of Arab Republics -- the short-lived political union between Egypt, Libya, and Syria. Though the federation collapsed within a few years, its name stuck: the palace is still known in Arabic as Qasr al-Ittihadiyya, the Federation Palace. In the 1980s, after extensive renovation, President Hosni Mubarak made it one of Egypt's official presidential palaces. Today it is among the most restricted of Egypt's five presidential residences, surrounded by simple gardens that betray nothing of the extravagance within.

The architecture endures as the building's most remarkable feature. Alexander Marcel of the French Institute designed the Central Hall's interior, and Georges-Louis Claude decorated it. The 589-square-meter hall, topped by a dome reaching 55 meters from floor to ceiling, was the hotel's theatrical heart. Persian carpets covered the floor, mirrored panels doubled the sense of space, and a marble fireplace anchored the room. The upper gallery contained oak-paneled reading and card rooms. In December 2012, the palace became the backdrop for a very different kind of drama when protesters opposed to President Mohamed Morsi's constitutional declaration clashed with his supporters outside the gates, leaving at least 10 dead and hundreds injured. The building that began as a monument to Belle Epoque excess has become a symbol of something harder to define -- a place where Egypt's colonial past, its nationalist ambitions, and its political struggles all converge under a single extraordinary dome.