In installing his large collection of medieval and Renaissance artefacts in the former town house of the abbots of Cluny in 1833, French aristocrat Alexandre Du Sommerard not only offered an afterlife to one of the few Gothic mansions surviving in Paris, but also set a pattern of historical reconstruction involving the reuse of salvaged objects and antiques. Unfortunately lost to the contemporary viewer because of later transformations to the space after it was turned into a museum, Du Sommerard’s creative display fired many an imagination throughout the nineteenth century. This paper is about a series of Orientalist interiors designed in France and in Egypt by early amateurs of Islamic art such as Gaston de Saint-Maurice, Alphonse Delort de Gléon, Ambroise Baudry, Ernest de Blignières, Albert Goupil, Edmond de Rothschild and Henry D’Allemagne. Besides partaking in the culture of collecting, most of their ventures share the attribute of having been related in one way or another to Du Sommerard’s enterprise. Two ensembles are considered in particular here. They are viewed both as a material system characterized by the processing of reused items, replicas and antiques, and as the physical stage of social interactions. The overarching hypothesis is that such forms of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total works of art, should be analyzed not only as spaces where distinction was performed, but indeed as expressions of gendered self-definition at a time of changing male lifestyles.