Nasseef House 2.72

Nasseef House or Nassif House is a historical structure in Al-Balad, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. As of 2009 it is a museum and cultural center which has special exhibits and lectures given by historians.HistoryThe construction of Nasseef House on old Jeddah's main street, Suq al-Alawi, began in 1872 and it was finished by 1881 for Omar Nasseef Efendi, member of a wealthy merchant family and, governor of Jeddah at the time. When Abdulaziz Ibn Saud entered the city in December 1925, after the siege of Jeddah, he stayed in the Bayt Nasseef. During his early stays in the city he used it as royal residence and received guests here. John R. Bradley, author of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis, described the Nasseef House as "kind of social salon" in the 1920s, as consuls and merchants gathered there. The house belonged to the Nasseef family until 1975, when Muhammad Nasseef turned it into a private library that eventually accumulated 16,000 books, which could be read by anyone visiting him. Today these books belong to the central library of King Abdulaziz University.Layout and designNasseef house has 106 rooms and the art work some of the rooms contain is admirable. Besides works on wood, others on tiles can be seen as well as Arabic calligraphy. The design style is said to be Ottoman Turkish. This rather describes more the period during which it was built than relationship to designs popular in the Umayyad and Abbasids cultural centers at this time such as Baghdad, Cordoba and Damascus. The style is thought to be more related to stylistic elements found along the Red Sea, Egypt and maybe the Levant at that time.