In the late 19th century, urban governance became one of the main reform tools of the Ottoman Empire serving to project the imperial presence on far-flung provinces at the same time that it began producing "provincial" capitals. As one such capital, Beirut's relationship to the center was transformed by its twin definition as a center of surveillance and as a target of urban reform. Institutions such as the municipality and legal corpuses such as municipal and building laws transformed the relationship between the inhabitant and her city as one mediated by a municipal bureaucracy and steered by nested hierarchies of power tying the city to the imperial capital. The impact this had on the urban development of Beirut is well documented and researched, but much less attention has been paid to the changes in the idealized opposite of the public sphere, namely "the private sphere." This paper investigates the legal reconfiguration of domesticity in late Ottoman Beirut. Using the Hanafi court records and minutes of municipal council meetings, I show how certain areas of domestic life that had up to the late 19th century been overseen by the Hanafi court were transferred to the domain of the municipal council. Although there were no specific state reforms focusing on domestic space, under the press of urban reform and the changing commercial position of the city, the value of domestic space was increasingly mediated by a real estate market. In this context, I argue, legal categories in the Hanafi court - such as common law and spatial and visual relations - were replaced by a generalized understanding of the home as real estate property whose value was defined by its novelty and location. This shows that rather than bifurcate into a secular/public and religious/personal apparatuses, the late Ottoman legal system fundamentally redefined certain realms of privacy by removing them from the authority of the religious court and recasting them under a new mode of urban governance. In the absence of a comprehensive archive of the late Ottoman courts in Beirut (commercial, nizamiye, and mixed courts) evidence gleaned from the management of the built environment offers a new perspective on the reconfiguration of state power and its effect on everyday life in the city.