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Buildings and Structures

Mena House

Hospitality Buildings

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.

Facts
Building Type
Hotel 1
Location
Giza, Egypt 1
Completed Year
1886 2
Classification
Standing Status
Standing 1
Building Type
Building Type (category)
Hotel 1
Connections

Has Building Type

Hotel, Concepts

Entity-backed identity for the building-type enum value this building already carries, resolved to an architecture concept by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The building-type fact itself stays on the building unchanged.

In the Other Atlases
  • Also in Geography Atlas: Egypt, located there.
Sources
1. Marriott Mena House, Cairo (Wikipedia)
  • Lead paragraph
    Hotel located just outside Cairo, Egypt
  • General information box, Location
    Giza, Egypt
  • History section
    The Locke Kings began construction on the hotel and opened it to the public in 1886 as The Mena House.
  • Entity description and the lead/infobox of the Wikipedia article
    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.
View the Source
2. Wikidata: Mena House
  • Wikidata Q1355271, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
  • Wikidata Q1355271, P571 claim (w-bbfill-artsarchag-0926)
View the Source
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