A collector's palace of Islamic manuscripts, Roman glass and jewellery, in one of the last great Beiruti mansions.
The house was built in the 1910s and 20s by Henri Philippe Pharaon, a Greek Catholic aristocrat, politician, racehorse owner and one of the signatories of Lebanon’s declaration of independence in 1943.
He spent decades filling it with things, and buying architectural fragments — carved wooden ceilings, tiled panels, marble fountains, whole rooms — from Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut houses that were being demolished, and installing them here.
The result is a mansion that is itself a museum of Levantine domestic architecture, with a Damascene reception room and an Andalusian courtyard built into it.
Pharaon was murdered in the house in 1993, at the age of 92, in a case that was never satisfactorily resolved.
The jeweller Robert Mouawad bought the property, restored it, added his own collection and opened it to the public in 2006.
What is in it
Islamic manuscripts — the strongest part. Qur’ans, calligraphy and illuminated pages from across the Islamic world, including some very fine Mamluk and Ottoman work.
Roman and Phoenician glass, in quantity, and much of it from Lebanon, which was one of the great glass-producing regions of the ancient world — the technique of glass-blowing is generally credited to the Phoenician coast in the first century BC.
Archaeological material — Bronze Age, Phoenician and Roman.
Ceramics — Iznik, Persian, Chinese.
Jewellery, both antique and from the Mouawad collections, and the section that the museum is best known for.
Icons, carpets, and a good deal of nineteenth-century furniture.
The house
For many visitors the building is the better part.
The carved and painted wooden ceilings brought from Damascus, the marble inlay, the mashrabiya screens, and the gardens.
Beirut had hundreds of houses like this before the 1960s. Very few survive — a run on Sursock Street, a few in Zokak el-Blat and Gemmayzeh, and a scattering elsewhere — and most of those are privately owned, decaying or under development pressure.
The triple-arched central hall is the characteristic Beiruti form, and this is one of the best places to stand in one.
Practical
Charged. Opening has been unreliable since the economic collapse of 2019 and the building took damage in the 2020 explosion. Telephone or check before travelling.
Ninety minutes.
Zokak el-Blat around it is a district of surviving late-Ottoman houses in various states, and is worth a short walk — though a great deal of it is derelict, which is itself part of the story of what has happened to Beirut’s building stock.
More Museums
National Museum of Beirut
The collection survived fifteen years on the front line because the director sealed it in concrete.
Sursock Museum
A Venetian-Ottoman villa given to the city as a modern art museum, wrecked by the port blast and reopened in 2023.
American University of Beirut
A green campus falling down a hillside to the sea, with the third oldest museum in the Middle East on it.