The land beneath the palace once belonged to Qajar princes, including members of the Farmanfarmaian family. In 1933, architect Levon Tadosian designed the building as a private residence for Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, then the crown prince. But Reza Shah, the crown prince's father, took a liking to the finished palace and claimed it as his own official winter residence and office. Before Iran enacted its National Treasury Law, the Iranian Crown Jewels were transferred from Golestan Palace to the Marble Palace's basement for safekeeping -- one of the world's most valuable gem collections stored beneath a building originally meant as a young man's house. The palace appeared on the 100-rial banknote during the Pahlavi era, its image circulating through millions of hands while the building itself remained closed to almost everyone.

In September 1941, British and Soviet forces invaded Iran, accusing Reza Shah of sympathies toward Nazi Germany. Under pressure, the king signed his letter of abdication inside the Marble Palace and departed the country, never to return. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, inherited both the throne and the palace. The younger shah made it his official office and residence. He married his second wife Soraya Esfandiary here in February 1951, in a ceremony held in the Hall of Mirrors. He later held his engagement to Farah Diba within these same rooms. But the palace also harbored danger. An assassination attempt by Reza Shams-Abadi on the palace grounds shattered the sense of security. After the shooting, the royal office was relocated to the more defensible Sahebgharaniyeh Palace in the northern foothills of Tehran, and the Marble Palace's role as the center of royal power quietly ended.

When the Islamic Revolution toppled the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979, the Marble Palace did not fall into disuse. It was immediately seized by the Revolutionary Committees, who established their headquarters in rooms where the shah had once received foreign dignitaries. The building then passed through a succession of institutional tenants. Senior judiciary officials -- including Yousef Sanei, Mousavi Ardabili, and Mohammad Yazdi -- set up offices in the palace. When the judiciary relocated to Shapour Gholamreza Palace in 1995, the building sat empty briefly before Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president turned head of the Expediency Discernment Council, moved in. Council meetings continued in the palace until two years after Rafsanjani's death in 2017.

The palace's exterior is clad entirely in white marble, giving it the name that has outlasted every regime change. Two Achaemenid-style soldiers carved in stone flank the entrance, holding arrows -- a deliberate connection to pre-Islamic Persian identity that the Pahlavis cultivated and the Islamic Republic has tolerated. Above the main hall rises a dome modeled on the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, one of the masterpieces of Safavid architecture. The dome is covered in arabesque tiles with scroll-like patterns, and the room beneath it is known as the Hall of Mirrors. The interior was furnished with Persian rugs and rich fabrics, the tiles crafted by Ostad Yazdi, and the paintings executed by Ostad Behzad. The two-story structure, surrounded by gardens, blends European palatial scale with distinctly Persian decorative traditions.

In 2018, the Expediency Council transferred the palace to the Mostazafan Foundation, an organization originally established to manage assets confiscated from the Pahlavi family. After extensive restoration, the Marble Palace opened to the public for the first time in 2020 as the Museum of Iranian Art. Visitors can now walk through the Hall of Mirrors, study the Achaemenid guardians at the entrance, and stand in the rooms where Reza Shah ended his reign with a signature. The transformation from private residence to royal office to revolutionary headquarters to judiciary chambers to council meeting room to public museum traces the entire arc of modern Iranian history. Each chapter left the marble intact but changed everything that happened within it.