The Ali Vafi Mansion (also known as the Memduh Pasha and Ayvaz Pashazade Waterfront Mansion) is the first of the waterfront mansions of Arnavutköy, a district famed for its vineyards in the Byzantine period and its strawberry fields in the Ottoman era. It was built in the early years of the 20th century. Originally owned by an Armenian banker and the largest of the Arnavutköy waterfront mansions, it passed to Ali Vafi Bey of Crete in 1915. In 1904, Memduh Pasha commissioned Raimondo D'Aronco to build another structure directly behind this one.

Built in an eclectic spirit dominated by Art Nouveau, a style rarely seen along the Bosphorus, the mansion resembles the Late Ottoman civil architecture of newer residential areas such as the Princes' Islands, Yeşilköy, Erenköy and Suadiye. The three-storey mansion has two large belvederes, each flanked by two small skylights that sit beside them like offspring, a reinforced concrete structural system and timber façades. On the seaward façade, two projecting bays rise from the ground floor through the two upper floors and end in a pointed roof rise at attic level. On the first and second floors, a balcony runs between the two bays, connecting them.

The rear façade has three balconies on each floor, with a wider one on the central axis. Distinct string courses mark the floors on the façade, while extensions of the window frames form geometric ornaments on the walls. The pointed roof rises are accentuated by pointed-arch timber decoration. Immediately to the right is an orangery with a glazed ground floor. The Memduh Pasha Waterfront Mansion was most likely destroyed by the fire that broke out at the Karatodori Pasha Waterfront Mansion on 3 July 1919. It was rebuilt true to the original in the 1980s.