The mansion was built between 1875 and 1879 by Gaston de Saint-Maurice (1831–1905), a French aristocrat who became equerry at the Egyptian court in 1868. The house was designed as a repository for the architectural and ornamental art of historic Cairo, based on the principle of creating interiors from reassembled old materials.
Saint-Maurice’s collection, which comprised several hundred objects of Islamic art, was exhibited at the world’s fair in Paris in 1878 and transferred to the South Kensington Museum in London in 1884.
The centrepiece of the house was a large cruciform and lavishly decorated vestibule similar to the reception halls (qāʿa) of the grand houses of Mamluk- and Ottoman-period Cairo. A central skylight, embellished with stucco and glass windows, diffused a shimmering light, and a large mashrabiyya, also with stucco and glass windows, closed off the main recess of the room.
In 1887, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs bought the house for diplomatic use. In 1937, when the French embassy moved to new premises, the house was demolished, but some of its decor was dismantled and reassembled in the new chancellery (Volait, 2012, p. 171; Volait, 2021, chap. 1.2.).
The eight stucco and glass windows set in the mashrabiyya of Saint-Maurice’s house were published by Saladin and Migeon in 1907 in their Manuel de l’art arabe (IG_87). They seem to have been reused in the new chancellery (cf. Volait, 2012, 173).