Gayer-Anderson Museum

Not an object collection so much as a collection of rooms: two Ottoman-period Cairo houses, joined by a bridge and furnished by their last private occupant with Islamic, Pharaonic and Asian pieces he gathered across Egypt and the region between 1935 and 1942. The building itself, restored to a private collector's taste rather than a museum's, is the primary exhibit; the single most famous object associated with the house, the bronze Bastet cat, left for the British Museum in 1939 and only a copy remains on site.

The museum is not one building but two, built roughly a century apart and only joined later. The smaller, western house was built in 1545 (947 AH) by the scholar Abd al-Qadir al-Hadad and passed through several owners before taking the name Bayt Amna bint Salim, after a later occupant. The larger, eastern house was built in 1631 (1041 AH) by Hajj Muhammad ibn Salem ibn Jilmam al-Jazar for his own family, and it took its name, Bayt al-Kritliyya - the House of the Cretan Woman - from a later owner, a wealthy Muslim woman from Crete. At an unrecorded date the two houses were connected by an enclosed wooden bridge at third-floor level, so that a single household could move between them without going out into the street. That bridge, more than any single room, is the physical proof that this museum is a merger rather than a design: two private houses, built for two different families, in two different decades of Ottoman Cairo.

Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1904 and transferred to the Egyptian Army in 1907, reaching the rank of Major by 1914. After retiring from military service in 1919 he stayed in Egypt in civilian roles, including Senior Inspector at the Ministry of the Interior and Oriental Secretary to the British Residency, and spent those decades collecting Islamic, Pharaonic and Asian antiquities, small sculpture, jewellery and pottery. In 1935 he petitioned the Assembly for the Preservation of Arab Antiquities for permission to live in the two adjoining, by-then-decayed houses and to restore and furnish them in Islamic-Arabic style; the request was granted, and he moved in the same year, installing electricity and plumbing and refitting the rooms with his own collection and with furniture, carpets and fittings brought in from elsewhere in the region. He is recorded as having had a sailing boat built, named La Maree, specifically to collect antiques along the Nile. Ill health forced him to leave Egypt in 1942; under the terms of his original agreement, the houses and their contents passed to the Egyptian state, and King Farouk made him a Pasha in recognition. Gayer-Anderson died in England in 1945, three years after leaving the house he had spent seven years restoring.

The single object most associated with Gayer-Anderson's name is not in this museum. Among his collection of small Egyptian bronzes was a Late Period figure of a cat, one form of the goddess Bastet, dated to around 600 BC. In 1939, three years before he left Cairo, Gayer-Anderson donated the original bronze to the British Museum, where it is now displayed in Room 4 of the Egyptian sculpture gallery as the Gayer-Anderson cat, described by the museum's own curator as among the finest surviving bronze cats from ancient Egypt. He kept a copy for his own house in Cairo, and it is that copy, not the original, that stands in the Ancient Egyptian Room here today. A visitor who has seen photographs of the famous cat and expects to find it in Cairo is looking at the wrong building; the original left for London the year before Gayer-Anderson himself left Egypt.

The ceremonial reception hall of Bayt al-Kritliyya and the roof terrace above it were used as filming locations for the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, standing in for the Cairo mansion of the character Fekkesh. It is a detail visitors raise unprompted in reviews, and the rooftop in particular is recognisable against production stills from the film, largely unchanged since. The museum makes no particular feature of this itself; it survives mainly as a fact repeated by visitors and by later writing on the house rather than something the institution promotes on its own visit pages.

At 4.6 out of 5 across 225 Tripadvisor reviews, this is one of the more highly rated small museums in Cairo, and the reviews are specific rather than generic: visitors name the Damascus Room, the Persian Room, the bridge and the roof terrace rather than writing only about 'the collection'. The recurring reservation is the building's condition and navigability - more than one reviewer asks for renovation work, and more than one describes the route between the two houses and their several floors as confusing without a guide, which is an understandable consequence of touring two separate 16th- and 17th-century houses joined after the fact rather than a single building designed to be walked through.

We publish no visitor review prose and cite no single platform score as fact; this is our own reading of the pattern in what reviewers say. Visitors consistently describe the two joined houses as the most atmospheric small museum in Cairo, naming specific rooms - the Damascus Room, the Persian Room, the roof terrace, the bridge - rather than writing in generalities, and several connect the house to the 1977 Bond film shot there. A recurring complaint is that the building shows its age: more than one reviewer asks for renovation, and the route between rooms and floors is described as confusing without a guide.