Project for a house, based on a shell of formal hotel which was built in seventies.

Not far from Lake Ladoga, on the bank of the river Chernaya Rechka (Black River), there was an estate of impressive size, with a farm, a garden and kitchen gardens. The client, who had fallen in love with this untouched place and is very fond of the traditional rural life-style, asked the architect to build a house in a style with light touches of the Provencal rural spirit.

The gentle flowing of the river seen through the picture window in the drawing room gives a feeling of peace and calm.
The apparently undemanding simplicity of the rural life style cannot be stylised in a mechanical way. The personal, family context calls up fond images from the memory; coloured with episodes reflected upon and brought to mind many times. The picturesque rustic style, giving the wooden surfaces a certain degree of ruggedness, arouses pleasant associations, full of romanticism.

The stucco facades of the house have borrowed elements typical of southern Europe. The corbels are made of glue-bonded mahogany.
The low ceilings suggest the influence of a French village. The rural setting has a nostalgic attraction, enchanting in its naivety.

This house was built for a young family, prosperous and successful, whose ideas of the ideal house were expressed in these lines. From the great variety of what they have seen and admired in architecture all over the world, their eyes and memories have captured distinctive details and proportions, character and mood, materials and images which have now become part of their daily life, the projection of precious words and meanings in a project bearing witness to classicism.

All the joinery work — the kitchen, the cupboards, wardrobes and wall panels — is based on bespoke designs, with carefully drawn detailing, which, because each detail is absolutely right, make the house impressive and unique.

The reconstruction was done with minimum of interference to the particular atmosphere, thoughtfully created by the owners. Paintings, elements of the attires, wallpaper of Morris give away the stylistical ardor of the owners.

In Repino, a health resort suburb of St Petersburg on the banks of the Finnish Gulf of the Baltic Sea, a house with a grass roof has been constructed. This solution was prompted by the desire to avoid damage to the environment and the need to increase the size of the living area of the log house which already existed on the site in a way which would not be out of keeping with its Finnish architecture.

The curved natural forms of the building help to incorporate it into the existing landscape with the greatest flexibility. Not a single tree was sacrificed. The elegant curved vestibule is adorned by an ornamented stucco dome. The complex space of the drawing room, positioned under a vaulted earth roof, is filled with light entering through various window openings This creates the atmosphere of a modern home with elements of a traditional Russian country estate. A tree enclosed in glass in the interior fits in naturally and picturesquely with the forest theme of this magical place, celebrated by the artist Ilya Repin, who used to live here.

The structure of the building, made from a reinforced concrete shell, is camouflaged on the exterior with turf, while its interior is lined with wood. The long, winding corridor, positioned in the solid ground, has an upper lighting opening at the side, which follows the vaulted ceiling and passes into the rooms through bent glass frames, serving as additional interior background lighting. The ceiling, rising along the parabola of the roof, makes the room feel more airy.

The skill of the specialist joiners and masons who carefully executed the curves designed by the architects deserves special mention.

The high-quality drama of life-style, expressed in the architectural formulae, shows that the owners of this house are unusual and free-spirited people, sophisticated and experienced, with an appreciation of art and culture. Paying great attention to detail has led to extreme fastidiousness. When fastidiousness becomes a habit, it makes life itself a work of art.

In 1910 on the river bank of Bolshaya Nevka in the suburbs of St. Petersburg a fine house   and an adjacent residence in northern modern style were built by an engineer Adolf Lemmerich.

The house was in a deplorable state, when its new owners turned to the architect with a request to reconstruct the façade of the building, which beheld its historical value, and to design the interiors of two separate apartments with a common entrance.

The brandmauer wall of the mansion was turned into a proper façade.

The small additions to the facades of the standard log house gave it bigger linkage with the historical landscape of Repino village, the former Kuokkala. The staircase to the upper floor is hidden behind the considerable fireplace in wood.

The structural design of the villa had to be within specific height restrictions and a defined overall area as it was erected on the site of a demolished building constructed in the 1960s.

Façades of the villa are constructed in a freer postmodernist style which reflects the client’s tastes, at the same time harmonizing with the local landscape. They are made of plaster with marble highlights in cornices, capitals, balustrades and plinths.

The entrance to the house on the curved axis of the vestibule is uncharacteristically located on the side of the building, alluding to the “compositive and intermedia” construction style. The main façade of the building faces directly on to a side street in a quiet Geneva suburb and is designed as a classical portico.

When an architect builds his own house, he inevitably comes across the problem of revealing and exposing his own taste, bringing into the public domain his own architectural precepts.
And it so happened that at that point in time the architect’s attention is turned to the northern part of Italy, to Vicenza, to Padua. So the choice of a Palladian style was felt to be the most natural alternative. Following the precedent created by thousands of previous architects it was only too easy to conceal our own predilections.
The plan of the building is based on the classical Palladian style with a strong central axis along which the entrance is positioned.

Two symmetrically located spiral staircases lead to the private first floor, dividing it into two separate areas.

The building’s facades are plastered in the traditional manner and style  and have only the very minimum of stucco décor.