The mansion was commissioned by Mehmet Habip Bey (1878–1926), a soldier and a deputy of Bolu from the Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Parliament of the Second Constitutional era (1908–1920),[1][2] and designed in 1912 by Giulio Mongeri (1873–1951), a Levantine architect of Italian descent.

[3][4][5] The construction of the house, also called the Bolulu Habip Bey Mansion, was financed by the trade in grain and bulgur, a cracked wheat foodstuff, during World War I.

A downstairs room was reserved as a birdhouse for hundreds of domestic canaries, which were probably raised to live in the branches of the Ottoman Bank.

[4] In 1955, the mansion became the target of looting during the Istanbul pogrom because of the non-Muslim families living there at that time and the non-Turkish character of the Ottoman Bank.

[1] In 2021, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality purchased the Bulgur Palas,[6] and began efforts to restore the building, intending to open it to the public as a document center, archive, library, exhibition hall, and café.