Former Presidential Palace of Kantari

The building stands at the corner of Rue Michel Chiha and Rue Abdel-Kader in the Kantari neighborhood of the Minet el-Hosn quarter of Beirut.^[1]

The only detailed architectural survey of the building's interior is Bodenstein's 2012 study, based on plans and site visits; no other published source describes its layout in comparable depth.^[1]

The house is built as a north-facing central-hall house of two residential storeys under a hipped tile roof, over a vaulted ground floor that, unlike in many comparable Beirut houses of the period, was used only for storage and utility purposes rather than as a kitchen.^[1] The two upper floors are reached differently: the lower of the two (the first upper floor) has a formal, double-flight open staircase rising from the north façade into a vestibule and the central hall, while the second upper floor is reached instead by a fully enclosed staircase on the building's east side. A further stair at the southeast corner serves the utility wings of both floors; Bodenstein considers this a later addition, probably dating to the building's conversion into a presidential palace, since a 1930s cadastral plan shows only a narrow external stair serving the first floor's utility area alone.^[6] The best-documented floor, the second upper storey, has a rectangular central hall oriented north–south, closed at its north end by a front hall and at its south end by a liwan, recorded in later, twentieth-century plans as a "living room", that projects outward from the building's otherwise cubic massing as a risalit. Both spaces are separated from the central hall by open, triple-arched screens. For a house of the mid-1880s, Bodenstein regards this plan as relatively conventional, and notably more conservative than contemporary houses built for the Sursock and Tuéni families.^[7]

Because of the building's width, the side halls flanking the central hall on its north side run transverse to the hall's main axis; each opens onto the central hall but not onto the front hall, leaving the latter more secluded than was typical for the period. One side hall connects, on its east side, to the enclosed staircase and, beyond that, to a utility wing of pantry, servant's room, toilet, and kitchen. The other side hall, by contrast, has its own independent entrance from outside the building, a detail Bodenstein suggests may indicate it originally served as the main reception room (manzul), though the same arrangement would be equally compatible with continuous use as a dining room.^[8] West of the liwan, a narrow corridor (rather than a further room, as on the east side) leads to what twentieth-century plans record as two bedrooms and a dressing room; Bodenstein suggests the arrangement may originally have comprised three separate bedrooms, showing an early move toward more clearly separated sleeping quarters that became increasingly common in Beirut housing of the following decades. A small arched loggia on the building's west side, of a kind already found in large Beirut houses of the 1850s–60s, originally caught the westerly night breeze for the bedroom wing; it was later converted into a bathroom during the French Mandate period.^[9]

• Baabda Palace – Residence of the President of Lebanon
• Saint Elias Maronite Church, Kantari – Church in Beirut
• Heneine Palace – Historic mansion in Beirut, Lebanon
• Moussa Sursock Palace – Historic mansion in Beirut, Lebanon
• Ziade Palace – Grand mansion in Beirut, Lebanon