The Azm Palace is an 18th-century Ottoman mansion that stands as the finest piece of domestic architecture to survive in Hama. Built in 1742 by Assad Pasha al-Azm — the Ottoman governor of Damascus who also commissioned the grander palace of the same family in the Syrian capital — it follows the same plan of interconnected courtyard houses, each courtyard planted with citrus trees and centred on a marble fountain. The exterior gives little away; the beauty is inside, in the painted wooden ceilings, the coloured stonework of alternating black basalt and pale limestone, and the elaborate muqarnas (honeycomb vaulting) above doorways.
The palace was converted into a regional museum and held an important collection of Roman mosaics, Islamic ceramics, Byzantine coins, and folk-costume displays. The Roman pieces were particularly notable — the region around Hama produced some of the finest mosaics of the late Roman period, and several large floor panels were on display in the lower courtyards. The collection's current state is uncertain following the years of conflict since 2011, but the building itself was a landmark example of Syrian courtyard architecture in the Ottoman tradition, comparable to the grander Azm Palace in Damascus but more intimate in scale.