The Italians built Villa Somalia in the new section of Mogadishu they were developing in the late 1930s. It sat on elevated ground overlooking the city and the Indian Ocean, with access to both the harbor and Petrella airport, now known as Aden Adde International. The original structure was a large, squarish stucco building with a tiled roof, designed in the Art Deco style that was fashionable in Italian colonial architecture of the period. Contemporary accounts described it as a symbol of modernist ambition, though it was modernism in the service of empire. The Italians had built the building to house their governors; the Somalis who gained independence in 1960 repurposed it as their presidential palace without fundamentally altering its form. Architecture outlasts the intentions of its builders.

In the chaos that followed the collapse of Siad Barre's government in 1991, Villa Somalia became a prize. By the early 2000s, it was under the control of Hussein Farah Aidid, son of the warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid and himself a powerful figure in the Somali National Alliance. Aidid used the compound as a base to attack the newly formed Transitional National Government. In June 2003, an internal dispute among his forces led to the discharge of a heavy weapon on the Villa's grounds, producing one of the largest explosions in the capital since the civil war began. The presidential palace had become a military position, its symbolic authority reduced to the practical advantage of its high ground and thick walls.

The summer of 2006 brought rapid changes. When the Islamic Courts Union defeated the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism, Villa Somalia was one of the last warlord holdouts in the city, held by militia loyal to Hussein Aidid. The ICU eventually seized it and established their headquarters inside. Their control lasted months, not years. In January 2007, following Ethiopia's military intervention, Transitional Federal Government president Abdullahi Yusuf arrived at Mogadishu airport and was escorted by Ethiopian troops to Villa Somalia. The TFG relocated its seat of government from Baidoa to the capital. The Ethiopian embassy soon set up within the Villa Somalia compound itself, and Ethiopian Colonel Gabre Heard directed military operations against insurgent groups from inside the presidential palace. Three different authorities in roughly two years, each inheriting the same building and the same unresolved question of who truly governed.

Under President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, Villa Somalia underwent its most significant transformation since the colonial era. The compound was comprehensively renovated and reconstructed, with new buildings added to the original complex. On October 1, 2025, the modernized presidential complex was reopened. The renovation represented something more than new offices and facilities. For a country where the seat of government had been a battlefield, a weapons depot, and a foreign military base within living memory, the act of rebuilding the presidential palace was itself a statement about the possibility of stable governance. Villa Somalia remains what it has always been: a barometer of who holds power in Mogadishu, expressed in stucco and tile on the highest ground in the city.