A Cairo Apartment That Holds Its Own Against the View Below

Thirty floors above Cairo, the view is hard to escape. The Giza Pyramids sit on one side, the Salah El Din Citadel and Old Cairo on the other, while the Nile runs through the middle of it all. From every room in Crimson Nile Hospitality Apartment, the city makes an appearance.

Located in Garden City and completed just two months ago, Crimson Nile is available to rent as a hospitality apartment. That view caught Mirette Helmy, Founder & Creative Director of Sequel By M, and Munny Hossam, Partner & Technical Director at the studio, the moment they first visited the apartment. It also gave them their starting point.

“When you have a view like this, 30 floors above Cairo, the direction of the design had to be up to the scale of this view,” says Helmy.

The studio called its concept “Layers of Egyptian Heritage”, drawing from different eras, materials and details found across the city and bringing them into the apartment.

Crimson was one of the first decisions. The colour runs across parts of the apartment, including the living room ceiling, and gives the home much of its character. It was also a colour the designers knew could easily go wrong.

“The first time I saw it on the mood board, I was like; should we do it or not?” says Hossam.

“Crimson is very authentic and it's not used much anymore,” Helmy says. “If someone uses it now, people will say it's old. And we want to combine the old with the new.”

That idea starts at the front door. A black and white checkered floor recalls the patterned floors found in older Egyptian houses and palaces. The corridor continues with palm patterned wallpaper, which appears again in the dining nook. Palm trees are deeply woven into Egypt’s landscape, making the pattern a natural reference to the country.

The apartment's original layout kept the kitchen, reception, dining area and corridors quite separate. The studio opened up the walls and connected the spaces, giving the view a much bigger role while keeping the different zones intact.

“We wanted to have this view inside the apartment as much as we can,” says Hossam.

One of the clearest examples is the living room, where the view takes precedence over the television. Instead of building the room around a large TV unit, the screen was placed discreetly to one corner. The seating faces the windows, with plants and a generous opening towards Cairo creating a space that is more about sitting with the view than watching something on a screen.

The designers also looked to Cairo's architecture when deciding what should happen to the newly opened spaces. Arches became one of the recurring details. Sequel By M drew from both Coptic and Islamic architecture, simplifying the forms and using them in different parts of the apartment. In the living room, the arches frame one of the main walls, with brass appliques adding detail around them.

Pottery, coloured glass, Egyptian patterns and Pharaonic references appear throughout the apartment. The ankh features among the accessories, while brass and gold show up in the lighting, handles and smaller details, referencing the materials associated with the Mamluk period and adding another point in the apartment's timeline of Egyptian influences.

Mirrors are placed repeatedly around the home. Some were there because a hospitality apartment needs plenty of them. Others make the rooms feel larger and, more importantly, give the city another way to enter the apartment. A reflection catches a window here, a piece of furniture there, and suddenly you are seeing the same room from completely different angles.

The ceilings became another place for Sequel By M to experiment. Crimson paint and patterned wallpaper move from one space to the other, sometimes covering the ceiling and sometimes shifting onto the walls. The studio added indirect lighting that follows the shape of the ceiling. It was a technically challenging detail, but the light brings out the curves and creates a softer glow at night.

Outside, the terrace changes the mood completely. Patterned cement tiles cover the floor, while forged metal furniture recalls the terraces of the 1960s. Then there is that view again, stretching around the apartment in almost every direction.

In one bedroom, the bed sits surprisingly close to the door. It looks unconventional when you first walk in, until you realise where it places you. Sit on the bed and your body naturally turns towards the window, giving you a direct view of Old Cairo and the Citadel.

The headboard creates a narrow passage behind it, which becomes the dressing area. Exposed clothing rails mark the space clearly. Beside the bed, a flock of stainless steel birds flies across the wall, inspired by the doves commonly seen circling above the minarets of Old Cairo.

The master bedroom brings the outside view even closer. In an unexpected move, the sink sits outside the bathroom, directly in front of a window overlooking Old Cairo and the Citadel. Instead of placing a conventional mirror behind the sink, the studio allowed the view to take its place. A rotating mirror remains nearby, but the landscape becomes the first thing you see.

It is perhaps the clearest expression of what Sequel By M were trying to achieve throughout Crimson Nile Hospitality Apartment. The Egyptian references appear in the arches, crimson ceilings, patterned floors, brass details, furniture and even the small flock of birds beside a bed. Each one connects the apartment back to the city outside.

After all, there was already plenty of Cairo to work with outside the windows. The challenge was finding a way to let it into the apartment.