You can learn a lot about a dictator from their domestic decor. Saddam Hussein had a thing for gold loos and erotic fantasy murals. Blonde beefcakes wrestled with serpents while scantily clad heroines rode on flying carpets across the walls of his gilded banqueting suites. He liked history too, rebuilding Frankenstein versions of ancient Babylonian palaces up and down the country in a steroidal Islamo-brutalist pastiche.
Colonel Gaddafi, meanwhile, preferred the simple life. He opted to live in a luxury Bedouin-style tent in the grounds of his fortified mansion, filled with jewel-encrusted guns and mermaid thrones. He mixed this desert-disco chic with a touch of the teenage girl's bedroom: a wall-size poster of Jake Gyllenhaal was found adorning one of his grand halls.
So what about monster of the moment, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad? We know he's a bit of a tech geek, as former head of the Syrian Computer Society, and is a keen amateur photographer, but it is a mystery what makes this ophthalmologist-turned-butcher feel at home.
The tacky taste of tyrants is usually only revealed once they have been toppled, when the US army moves in and converts the ruins of their glitzy creations into palatial playgrounds for demob-happy troops. We do know, from when Andrew Gilligan popped round for tea in 2011, that Assad used to live in a "large-ish suburban bungalow" on an unguarded street. It was decked out with leather sofas, on which the president sat and joked while wearing jeans, in a you-can-call-me-Bash kinda way.
Rumours abound that, since he launched a grand massacre of his own people, Assad has upgraded his quarters and taken to hiding out elsewhere. Some think he has fled to live on a warship guarded by the Russian navy. Others say he has retreated to a fortified base near the coastal town of Latakia, his ancestral home.
Some clues may be gleaned from the shots that the budding snapper-despot has been uploading on to his new Instagram account. He joined the service last month and has already racked up 38,000 followers, to whom he reveals snippets of his banal daily routine. Here he is having a go with a trowel, or chilling out on the sofa with his favourite athletes. Keen to reinforce his academic credentials, he has posted an archive photo of himself preparing for his GCSEs. Elsewhere, he is showncongratulating soldiers on their fine demolition jobs and inspecting his handiwork in hospital, while his saintly wife doles out hot food to the hungry.
But in this contrived torrent of at-home-with-Assad – a nascent social media strategy that also includes a Twitter feed and YouTube channelfull of clips of him blowing things up to dramatic music – not much is given away about the nature of the presidential palace. So, in honour of the passing of David Frost, we attempt to go through the Assad keyhole and ask: "Who lives in a house like this?"
While Gilligan was given the bungalow treatment, heads of state have been ritually summoned to a hilltop fortress that sprawls across the plateau of Mount Mezzeh to the west of Damascus. Surrounded by a high security wall studded with guarding watchtowers, the New Shaab Palace stands gleaming above the city like a modern Acropolis. Designed in 1975–9, and completed in 1990, it is the work of celebrated Japanese architect Kenzō Tange – who, ironically, is perhaps best known for designing the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, built in 1955. Tange resigned before construction began, leaving the project to be interpreted and remodelled by successive contractors, but it retains the hallmarks of his stripped, structuralist approach.
The complex was commissioned by Bashar's father, Hafez Al-Assad, who reportedly wasn't happy with the result. Paranoid about being assassinated as a sitting duck on top of the hill, he never lived there, claiming the palace wasn't intended for him, but for his successor. That was originally planned to be his eldest son, Bassel, a playboy thug who would never have the chance to move in: he was killed in 1994, when he crashed his Maserati driving at 150mph.
Composed of vast white planes of Carrara marble, punctuated by thin arrow-slit windows, the complex is scaled with a pompous monumentality unexpected of Hafez, a so-called "man of simple tastes". The massive masonry walls define hidden inner courtyards and extend out to frame expanses of tinted glazing at their ends, cantilevered over the hilltop like blank, all-seeing eyes. From the city below, a jumble of concrete apartment blocks and low-rise housing, you cannot escape the sense of being watched over by some mute, panoptic force.
Like every good dictator's palace, the arrival sequence is designed to make visitors feel as small as possible. Guests are driven along a curving road around the base of the hill up to a tall gateway, from where a straight kilometre-long driveway extends on axis to the palace building. Two arcing roads extend off from the drive, describing something of a phallic shaft in plan, visible from Google maps – perhaps a symbolic gesture Tange incorporated before leaving the project, unbeknown to his client.
This interminable drive continues past a series of landscaped terraces up to an agoraphobia-inducing forecourt, where a single star-shaped fountain lies marooned in an expanse of stone paving. From here, steps lead up to a monumental gateway, a blank white portal decorated with a vault of abstracted Islamic muqarnas motifs, the one concession to decoration in this otherwise faceless facade.
Within, the palace is scaled with the echoing monotony of a congress hall. A red carpet leads through a sequence of 20-metre high chambers, dimly lit, each with their own ceremonial entrance and each decorated with a different interpretation of the five-pointed Islamic star in the floor. Like Assad's Instagram account, it is bleached of any nuance or identity, all as soulless as any corporate office lobby. As one American journalist put it, "it's like entering the Emerald City of Oz, as remodelled by the North Koreans … a cold and intimidating fortress, empty except for scurrying aides."
A report from 1989 claimed that one room was fitted with 125,000 marble tiles, at $85 a tile – equating to $10.6m for a single room. Rumours from the same time suggest the entire complex could have cost up to $1bn, all funded by Saudi oil money.
Yet it is a billion-dollar home that, reportedly, has never been loved or lived in by any of the Assad clan. Assad senior is said to have been particularly annoyed by the 25-foot-long staircase that led up to his office. "He said how could he expect visitors to walk up it?" said a diplomat at the time, adding that it might have been the opulence that put him off living there. "He's not particularly into conspicuous consumption," he said. "His office is crummy. Just a square room and few sofas. And he lives in a rundown, dingy, small apartment building" – conditions, it sounds likely, that the besieged Bashar is only too keen to return to.
It may not be that homely, but at least it will make a majestic series of basketball courts when the Americans move in.
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