Hotel Cecil, Alexandria, Egypt (in Agatha Christie, Somerset Maugham, Lawrence Durrell)

Designed by Alessandro Loria, in 1929 the Cecil Hotel in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most luxurious and popular establishments in the city during the 1930s and 40s. Among its guests were Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Al Capone, and Lawrence Durrell, who used the hotel as a setting for his famous Alexandria Quartet. The Egyptian government took ownership of the hotel in the 1950s, but the family of the original owner regained property rights in 2007.

Alessandro Loria was born in Mansoura, Egypt, to an Italian family in 1880. He lived in Tuscany and Cairo before settling in Alexandria in 1914. According to his daughter, his “life was his work... he worked hard seven days a week; he had no hobbies.” Although his most famous work was the Cecil Hotel, built in 1929, he designed many other buildings in Alexandria, including the Italian Hospital, the Jewish Hospital, the National Bank of Egypt, the Lido House Hotel, and “several of the most delightful buildings” in Alexandria’s eastern harbor. Building mainly in Moorish and Venetian styles and decorating his buildings with mosaics and arabesques, Loria gave Alexandria a “carnival-like appearance.”

Albert Metzger, a Jewish businessman from Alsace, moved to Alexandria in the early 1900s. He became a British citizen during World War I due to the difficulties of holding a German passport in British-occupied Egypt during the war. In 1929, he commissioned Alessandro Loria to build a hotel, which was initially named Regina Palace. Less than a year later, it was renamed the Cecil Hotel, after the Cecil Hotel in London, which was the largest hotel in Europe when it opened in the 1890s. In the 1930s and 40s, the Cecil Hotel was considered the best hotel in Alexandria; the British Secret Service used it as their headquarters during World War II. After the Egyptian revolution in 1952, the government seized the hotel and eventually incorporated it into the state hotel group Egoth. Five years later, the Metzger family was expelled from Egypt. They settled in Tanzania, purchasing the New Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam. In 2007, after a long and complicated legal battle, ownership of the hotel was returned to Patricia Metzger (Albert’s granddaughter) and her two children. The Metzgers sold the hotel back to the Egyptian government, which now leases it to the Sofitel hotel chain.

The Cecil Hotel in Alexandria is known for having hosted many celebrities and notable figures throughout its history. Each room is named after a famous personality who stayed there at some point, including the internationally renowned Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, British detective novelist Agatha Christie, Somerset Maugham, Josephine Baker, Henry Moore, Sir Montgomery, and even Al Capone. The hotel features in Lawrence Durrell’s "Alexandria Quartet" and Naguib Mahfouz’s novel "Miramar."

In 2007, after a lengthy legal battle, the rightful ownership of the hotel was returned to the Metzger family, who subsequently sold it to the Egyptian government. The hotel operated for many years as the "Sofitel Cecil Alexandria Hotel" until October 2014, when it joined the Steigenberger Hotels Company network, which now owns the hotel.

Sources:

http://archive.diarna.org/site/detail/public/182/

https://egyptianstreets.com/2022/02/27/the-cecil-hotel-heritage-by-the-sea/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Hotel_(Alexandria)