House with Chimeras

A house on a cliff

Vladyslav Horodetskyi, the best-known architect of Kyiv's Art Nouveau and the author of the Karaite Kenesa and St Nicholas Church, built this house for himself. In 1901 he bought a plot on Bankova Street above a steep ravine, which was thought unfit for building. He got it for next to nothing: about 15,600 roubles for 1,550 m². To hold the slope, the engineer Anton Strauss proposed driving some fifty cast-in-place concrete piles five metres deep. Horodetskyi co-owned a cement works, so the house also served as an advertisement for concrete, then a new material in Kyiv.

The terrain gave the house an unusual shape. It has three storeys on the Bankova side and six on the side facing today's Ivan Franko Square. The shell was finished in 1901, the decoration took until 1903, and the tenants moved in in 1904. A high parapet hides almost the whole roof, which is why it is called Kyiv's first house "without a roof".

Elio Sala's chimeras

The house owes its name to its sculpture, made to Horodetskyi's sketches by the Milanese sculptor Elio Sala, the architect's long-time collaborator. The themes are hunting, life on land and under the sea, and mythical creatures. Heads of elephants, rhinos, antelopes and a crocodile look out from the walls, and the drainpipes end in elephant heads. Lizards creep up the columns and a giant python coils around the corner. On the roof sit huge frogs, sea monsters and nereids with chains and flowers instead of hair. Above the sculpted fight between an eagle and a lioness, the master's scratched signature survives: "E. Sala. 1902".

The interiors matched the façades. At the entrance an octopus that seems to be made of seashells greeted guests. A huge dolphin wrapped in plants coils around a column of the main staircase, and the ceilings carry pineapples, bunches of grapes and the skulls of deer and elk. The walls held hunting scenes painted by the sculptor's brother Eugenio Sala and trophies of the owner himself, a passionate hunter. The stoves were faced with majolica tiles designed by Yeva Kulykovska and made at Andrzejowski's Kyiv factory.

An apartment house and its owner's fate

Horodetskyi lived in flat No. 3, about 380 m² facing Bankova Street, and let out the other six apartments. Rent was steep, around 3,500 roubles a year, but every family had its own wine cellar, woodshed, stable, carriage shed and even a cowshed. Among the tenants was Vsevolod Holubovych, later prime minister of the Ukrainian People's Republic. The architect's passion for hunting ended badly for the house. After an expensive African safari in 1911 he found himself in financial trouble. In 1912 he mortgaged his property and was never able to redeem it. In 1913 the house passed to the Blahodatynske sugar refinery company headed by Danylo Balakhovskyi, and in 1916 the merchant Samuil Nimets bought it.

Legends

The most popular legend says that Horodetskyi's daughter drowned and her grief-stricken father built an "underwater kingdom" in her memory. Biographers have disproved it: the architect's daughter Olena outlived her father by several decades. The story of a bet sounds more plausible. Horodetskyi supposedly wagered that within two years he would build a house on a cliff where no one dared to build, and he won. Some also say the architect put a curse on the house so that it brings happiness only to his descendants. Tourists still look for the crocodile on the façade for luck.

From polyclinic to presidential residence

After 1917 the house was nationalised. It housed the headquarters of a military labour unit, then the Veterinary Department of the Kyiv Military District. In the 1930s Kyivans called it the "Sea Bottom" and claimed it had belonged to a retired admiral. In spring 1944 it was given to actors of the Franko Theatre returning from evacuation, but later that year it was handed to the Communist Party's Central Committee as Polyclinic No. 1. After independence it housed the "Masterpieces of Ukrainian Art" museum centre for a while.

Over time the house cracked. Piles stood under only half of it, and where the two foundations met a crack up to 40 cm wide opened. During a restoration completed in 2004, new piles were driven 21 metres deep under the walls, the floors were replaced, and the stucco and original colour schemes of the interiors were restored. Since then the house has served as the President of Ukraine's residence for official and diplomatic ceremonies, including the presentation of ambassadors' credentials. It stands opposite the Office of the President, so access to Bankova Street has been restricted since 2022 and you cannot always see the chimeras up close.