The house stands at the corner of Suicide Alley in the Shangani quarter and is mostly closed to the public; staff at the doorway will usually let you peer into the courtyard and admire the carved door from the threshold. The upper floors are now divided into private flats, and parts of the building are visibly subsiding.
The building is worth a stop more for what it represents than for what survives inside. Tippu Tip's wealth, drawn from a trade in human beings that the British were simultaneously trying to abolish in the cathedral five minutes' walk away, is part of the same Stone Town story as the Old Slave Market memorial — and reading them in sequence makes more sense of both.