By Nabil Shawkat The Belgian Baron-General Edouard Empain commissioned French architect Alexandre Marcel to build this unusual residence in 1906 or shortly afterwards. The residence is commonly referred to as a palace and looks quite stunning from a distance. But it is remarkably compact inside, the scale and plan being those of an ordinary villa. Marcel made the structure look massive by placing it on an elevation of successive terraces, almost like a step pyramid, adding a tower literally lifted from an Asian temple to give it extra height. The villa has a conventional layout, with three large interconnected halls on the ground floor and sleeping quarters for the family on the first floor. The art deco bathrooms adjoining the bedrooms retain traces of their original features. The tower area boasts a wooden staircase that is astonishingly in a good shape. On the roof, you can walk among an arrangement of Indian sculpted columns, perhaps parts of the accessories Marcel imported but could not integrate anywhere below. Go down to the basement and you may walk through narrow corridors, over the original tiling, past servant quarters, and admire the corroded skeletons of the furnaces once used for cooking and washing. When Empain used the villa, it was furnished mostly with Belgian furniture, none of which remains. The walls were done in frescos, not particularly Indian, all gone now. The parquet floors were of intricate design and although now in poor shape, you may still make out the pattern if you look closely. At the time the villa was finished, in 1913, it was one of the earliest buildings ever to be built of reinforced concrete in this country, and if you examine the railings surrounding the villa, you would see a few reinforcement bars jutting out of the cement. Interestingly, the villa was the only building in the Heliopolis Oasis (now Al-Korba) to break the architectural mold imposed so rigorously by the company the Baron controlled. The company that built Heliopolis had to approve in advance all architectural plans and would have almost certainly turned down a request to build an Indian-style residential home. The villa was an eccentricity the Baron allowed himself in a world he practically owned. Empain died in 1929 and was buried in 1930 in the Basilica, the church situated at the centre of the oasis -- built also by Marcel and financed by the Baron. Empain's family sold the Indian villa in 1957. The Egyptian government bought it from private owners in March 2005 and is renovating it. The villa is currently open to the public free from charge from 10am till 6pm. * The writer is author of Heliopolis: A story in a hundred years
