Houses

Cache is King

Cairo-born Hussein Omar’s New York apartment is abundant in ancient Egyptian relics, but his collecting model has always been expansive. Recruiting interior designer Patrick McGrath to help, the historian has created a home that melds modern Manhattan with sphinx statues and Middle Eastern antiques
By Ivan Shaw Photography by Ngoc Minh Ngo
Hussein Omar apartment Manhattan
Above the doorway are Tunisian tombstones (likely Hafsid, 13th–16th century). On the wall hangs a Spanish painting of Christ, with physique photos by Bob Mizer in the corners. Next to it are two 19th-century Greek icons from Constantinople and a painting by Victor Brauner that formerly belonged to Alexander Iolas as well as Roberto Matta, who hung it in his Venice studio. An erotic drawing by Duncan Grant is placed above a self-portrait by Mexican/Lebanese photographer Tufic Yazbek taken in New York in around 1929–30. On the left pedestal is an Umayyad capital from Cordoba (10th century) and on the right pedestal an 18th-century Ottoman marble turban from a tombstone. The book case is arranged with an incomplete fragment from a Roman sarcophagus, a limestone Coptic head of Zeus formerly in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, a head of Amun from the collection of Alexander Iolas (8th century BC), sarcophagus mask (4th century BC), and a Roman Egyptian mummy mask (first century AD). The campaign chair in the foreground dates from the 1870s. The curtains are made of fabric traditionally used for clerics’ caftans in Cairo

Hussein Omar is very much alive. But after spending time with him in his apartment in Manhattan’s London Terrace, the Art Deco block in Chelsea that has long been a landmark in the neighbourhood, you realise that death plays a big role in his life and in his decorating choices. I first crossed paths with Omar in 2024 when he wrote a story for WoI on The City of the Dead, the fabled cemetery in Cairo that has been the final resting place for generations of Egyptians, including Omar’s mother and ancestors. Stepping into his apartment, one is immediately struck by how relics from the distant past seem to find a new vitality perched alongside 20th-century classics, and how the lives and stories from his forebears are very much present in his daily life.

Omar and his son, Ismael, landed in Manhattan in 2023 after living in Ireland, where Omar was a lecturer on modern global history at University College Dublin. Originally, father and son took temporary accommodation in London Terrace on the opposite side of the complex’s interior garden, while Omar looked for a permanent home. Luckily, the flat where they are now came on the market and he grabbed it, ‘signing the lease without even seeing the place’. Omar admits that when he first walked through the door, ‘I was pretty shocked. There was a giant bookcase with a massive TV and a tiny room had been turned into a really, really sad-looking office. And then I was like, “OK, we have to do something very dramatic to this space”.’

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On Hussein Omar’s desk sits an Egyptian figure of a Ba bird (seventh century BC), and a 17th-century Ethiopian triptych icon of the Virgin Mary. A reclining figure (1930s) by Yannis Tsarouchis hangs above a bird by the Senufo people of West Africa, which was formerly owned by the sculptor Arman. Evelyn Wyld and Eyre de Lanux created the tapestry on the wall in 1929, basing the design on the square Kufic calligraphy of a Cairo mosque

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A granite Ptolemaic Egyptian sphinx from the fourth century BC stands guard before a 16th-century painting of Saint Sebastian attributed to Gaspar Becerra. On the wall above hangs a photo by Armenian/Egyptian photographer Armand, showing Omar’s grandmother and her sisters in 1939. The demi-lune table is from the workshop of the architect Geoffrey Bawa and dates from the 1960s. Through the doorway, a 12th-century Fatimid marble kilga, or pedestal, provides a home for a houseplant

To say that Omar is a collector is a bit of an understatement. He comes from a long line of antiquaries and is deeply experienced in both the joys and sorrows of the life of a connoisseur. Both of Omar’s maternal grandparents came from families active in the market for art, antiques and books. ‘My mother’s father had one of the largest private libraries in the Middle East, but he was the kind of person who bought everything, including a mummy of a baboon that lived in my childhood bedroom.’

Things changed dramatically for Omar’s family and the rest of Egypt’s elite in 1983. The government enacted a law stipulating that it was illegal to own anything over 100 years old. Owners were given six months to turn their pieces over to the authorities for a determination as to whether they would be confiscated or purchased by the state – or the possessor (if they were lucky) could be deemed a ‘custodian on behalf of the state’.

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In a bedroom, a camel made by the artist Tamar Mogendorff for Ismael reclines on a cushion beneath an early 20th-century Moroccan child’s drawing of the Buraq, the mythical creature that transported the prophet Muhammad to the heavens

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An Egyptian tent fabric made for the tourist market at the turn of the century hangs framed on a wall. The piece was found in Edinburgh

Although Omar’s grandfather ‘was very correct about it’ and handed everything over, his younger brother – Omar’s uncle – decided to hide his treasures (which originally had belonged to his father) in seven slum flats. When the brother died, Omar and his family inherited them and discovered that it was ‘clear he had hidden all of the antiquities in the trash in medicine bottles wrapped in underwear’. In an attempt to get a handle on things, the family moved all of the items into one lodging and began cataloguing them. During that time, Omar had been studying in Britain. ‘I came back to the apartment one day and it was all gone.’ The family suspected that a doorman realised what they were doing and, knowing they couldn’t report the theft to the police as it was past the six-month deadline, ‘just scooped up the whole thing’.

In 2020, Omar’s grandmother died and left him a bit of money ‘with the express purpose that I might begin to form my own collection, now that I was no longer living in Egypt’. He singles out two important mentors who helped him develop his approach to acquisition. One was a cousin whose father bought French Impressionist works (WoI Nov 1982) and the second was an art dealer, Hisham Mehrez, ‘who was very special to me’.

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A Sarköy mosque kilim dating from the 18th century provides a backdrop to a bed, and on the left, below another Geoffrey Bawa demi-lune, sits an 18th-century Ottoman tombstone. Behind the side table on the right is a Fez tile panel, originally from a house, that dates from the 1700s

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Adorning a bedroom wall is a Flemish tapestry depicting the construction of Constantinople, with a late 17th-century Smyrna carpet fragment draped over a daybed. Above a ‘Sitzmaschine’ armchair (1905) by Josef Hoffmann is a photograph of Omar’s great-great-great-grandfather Abdu Barakat, taken in the 1870s

Each year, on 7 January, which is Christmas Day for Coptic Christians in Egypt, Mehrez would open the doors to an apartment that he had decorated and lived in the year before and invite friends to visit. The rooms were full of all the things he had purchased throughout the previous 12 months. A sale of all the objects would begin while Mehrez sat ‘behind a kind of curtain in a little closet… and waited until it was over’. Once everything was sold, he would come out and host a three-day celebratory party. Although Omar purchased numerous pieces from the annual event, he also received a number of gifts from his friend, who had a policy of never selling anything that he had originally been given as a present. Two such donations that Omar treasures are a tomb cover that hangs in Ismael’s bedroom and a rug displayed in the entrance to the New York flat.

Although he was delighted to secure his new home, Omar needed to figure out how to furnish it, as most of his things were still in Dublin. After a chance summertime meeting on Long Island’s south shore, Omar asked interior designer Patrick McGrath to help figure out a strategy to make the space work for father and son, as well as how best to handle Omar’s continually expanding accumulation of antiquities and design pieces. McGrath recalls that as soon as he walked in, ‘It was very clear. He has a real passion.’ Omar was relieved when McGrath quickly realised ‘there’s all sorts of things we could do to make this more liveable’.

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Over the bath is displayed a portrait of Omar reading the diaries of his ancestor Sa’d Zaghloul, Egypt’s first democratically elected head of state and leader of the country’s anti-colonial revolution of 1919, by Soufiane Ababri. On either side of it are three revolutionary posters in support of Zaghloul, dating from 1922

Both men felt that London Terrace’s history and design aesthetic were key to their mission of not just celebrating Omar’s connection to his ancestral home, but also embracing his life in New York and recognising that Art Deco is a key counterpoint to Omar’s passion for the ancient world. As Omar likes to point out: ‘Cairo was just a very exciting place in the 1920s.’ He’s suspicious of people in Egypt who have an ‘unmediated relationship with the ancient past. So much of it was filtered through the discovery of the country by the West in the 1920s and that’s the stuff that I find aesthetically the most exciting.’

McGrath found inspiration in what London Terrace represented at the time it was constructed in 1930. Not only was it built at a scale not seen before in Manhattan, but it was also intensely modern – having a state-of-the-art intercom system and gigantic indoor pool. Both believed that it was critical that there be a symbiotic relationship between Omar’s relics from the past and the ambiance of London Terrace. As McGrath notes: ‘Obviously, the works he owns are amazing, but we wanted to have little winks to New York.’ Omar points out he wanted ‘things that might speak to one another in a coherent way’. He points to a tapestry just behind me that was commissioned in 1929 and ‘was probably made in Algeria, but the design is lifted from a 13th-century Cairo mosque, and it was made by two Americans’.

Since Omar and McGrath first put the place together, a ‘pile of things’ has accumulated in the entrance hall. ‘I am very conscious that it’s getting crowded in here,’ says Omar, ‘but I’m never going to stop acquiring.’ Gesturing to a nearby tombstone and an Egyptian wooden Ba bird representing the departed soul, he muses, ‘Life, particularly here, is so divorced from the dead. I actually like to be in close proximity to reminders of death.’

Instagram: @totemsandtaboos