Construction began in June 1722, and Grand Vizier İbrahim Paşa was not interested in delays. Work did not stop for state holidays. A steady supply of marble arrived from nearby Çengelköy. Within two months — an extraordinary pace for a project of its ambition — Sa'dabad was complete.

The Kağıthane stream, which flows into the Golden Horn from the north, was widened by workers and flanked by two marble quays. The design emphasized open space and landscaped gardens rather than enclosed grandeur. More than two hundred residences were built on the greater grounds for Ottoman dignitaries, each colored and decorated according to its occupant's status. The main palace itself, as described by foreign visitors who managed to gain access, had a lead-covered roof supported by arches resting on thirty small pillars — light, airy architecture suited to summer evenings by the water.

Getting inside required connections and money. Foreigners who described Sa'dabad firsthand did so only after navigating considerable bureaucratic and social obstacles, suggesting the complex was as exclusive as it was beautiful.

Sa'dabad became the centerpiece of what historians call the Tulip Period — a roughly three-decade span during the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730) when the Ottoman court turned toward European aesthetic influences, elaborate festivity, and a passion for flowers, especially tulips. Feasts and parties at Sa'dabad were part of this broader culture of refined pleasure, and the pavilion served as the physical embodiment of İbrahim Paşa's vision for what the Ottoman court could be.

The cosmopolitanism was deliberate. Ottoman requests sent to the French ambassador around 1722 — likely intended to furnish the newly completed Sa'dabad — included nécessaires, commodes, Gobelin carpets, and thousands of wine bottles. A royal court poem composed under Ahmed III described Sa'dabad as surpassing Isfahan's famous chahar bagh garden. The pavilion's name, drawn from a poem İbrahim Paşa wrote after its completion, embedded the aspiration in the language itself. Other structures on the grounds received similar names: hürremabad (eternal joy), hayrabad (eternal goodness).

Sa'dabad lasted less than a decade. In 1730, a revolt led by the Janissary soldier Patrona Halil shook the capital. Halil's forces effectively took control of Istanbul, and Sultan Ahmed III was deposed. The Tulip Period ended with him.

The new sultan, Mahmud I, had no interest in repairing his predecessor's indulgence. He issued a decree: the remaining residents of Sa'dabad's grounds had three days to destroy their own homes and leave. The ultimatum proved academic — Halil's lingering rebels began tearing down the residences immediately, without waiting. The marble quays, the gardens, the two hundred colored houses of Ottoman dignitaries: all of it was dismantled or left to decay.

What the revolt destroyed, time finished. The pavilion no longer exists in any recognizable form. The Kağıthane district today is an urban neighborhood of Istanbul. The stream where workers once laid marble quays now runs through a thoroughly modern cityscape.

Sa'dabad was many things at once: a pleasure complex, a political statement, a piece of Ottoman self-fashioning in an age of increasing contact with European culture. İbrahim Paşa — the full name was Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Paşa, referring to his origins in Nevşehir and his status as the sultan's son-in-law — designed Sa'dabad as an expression of luxury, art, and cosmopolitanism. That vision was not universally welcomed. The Janissaries and their allies saw the Tulip Period's extravagances as corruption, a betrayal of Ottoman values.

The debate about Sa'dabad's architectural character continued even after its destruction. Some sources insisted the pavilion's rich design was fundamentally Ottoman, a continuation of the light kiosk tradition associated with the earlier Sultan Mehmed IV. Others pointed to the French imports, the European aesthetic influences, the very concept of a riverside pleasure palace, as evidence of something new. Perhaps both were true. Sa'dabad embodied a moment when the Ottoman court reached outward toward the world — and the world, in the form of revolution from within, reached back.