Mena House

Mena House stands at the edge of the Giza plateau in Egypt, directly facing the Great Pyramid of Giza, originally built in 1869 as a royal hunting lodge for Khedive Ismail Pasha before being sold and expanded into a hotel that opened in 1886. Its architecture blends Moorish and Islamic revival elements, including carved wooden mashrabiya screens, horseshoe arches and ornate ceilings, drawing on Egyptian and broader Islamic decorative traditions rather than the European styles common to other colonial-era hotels of the period. The hotel hosted the Cairo Conference of December 1943, at which Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-shek met to plan Allied strategy against Japan, and it has continued to host heads of state and international gatherings since. Its gardens and terraces, set directly beneath the pyramids, remain a defining feature of the property.