Bolshaya Porokhovskaya St., 18, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 195176
House No. 18 on Bolshaya Porokhovskaya Street seems to try to hide, standing slightly set back, concealing its narrow main facade behind tall sprawling trees. But the elegant balcony railings and the intricate metal crest (with the initials "PI" and the year of construction – "1901") above the tented roof cap invariably attract attention.
Meanwhile, this Art Nouveau mansion is a testament to the success of a man who, through his own enterprise, made the journey from peasant to merchant. Agree, an impressive career rise!
Pavel Ivanovich Ivanov was a peasant from the Saint Petersburg province who took up trade and achieved considerable success in this field. Business was booming, which allowed him in 1895 to purchase a plot of land on Porokhovskaya Street. Just six years later, on this plot, a three-story stone mansion in the Art Nouveau style was built according to the design of technician Mikhail Maksimovich Safronov.
The layout of this building is typical for a merchant’s house. The first floor housed the kitchen and rooms for the servants. The second and third floors contained rooms for the owner and his family members.
In merchant life, the house held a special place, and representatives of this class did not skimp on interior decoration. Some of the former splendor can still be seen in the "Pavlivanovka" today. The grand staircase is made of diabase (a rock known for its special durability), and the patterned railing is made of cast iron by remarkable St. Petersburg craftsmen.
The mansion has preserved several beautiful fireplaces: three are installed on the second floor, and two more on the third. The most famous of them—the "Peacock"—is located on the second floor. Perhaps it is this fireplace that gave the mansion one of its popular names—the "House with a Peacock." The tall, beautiful fireplace with bright ceramic decoration (mainly in green tones) is adorned with a figure of a peacock and, with its perhaps even excessive splendor and majesty, resembles its former owner. By the way, Pavel Ivanovich had the nickname "Peacock," so the resemblance is, as they say, obvious. Unfortunately, the head of the peacock from the famous St. Petersburg fireplace has been lost. You can see what it looked like at the State Historical Museum (GIM) in Moscow, where fragments of a second such fireplace are kept. (The second "Peacock" decorated the dining room in the mansion of Matvey Sidorovich Kuznetsov, a Russian industrialist and entrepreneur, founder of the "Partnership for the Production of Porcelain and Faience Products M. S. Kuznetsov," on 1st Meshchanskaya Street (now Mira Avenue) in Moscow.)
Merchant Pavel Ivanovich Ivanov died five and a half years before the October Revolution and did not witness how his real estate passed under Soviet control. However, it must be admitted that the Bolsheviks managed it wisely. In any case, the post-revolutionary fate of the "House with a Peacock" turned out relatively well. During the Soviet years, the mansion housed a sanatorium for dystrophic children, schools, and the district department of public education. Currently, the building houses the Centralized Accounting Department of the Krasnogvardeysky District Administration of Saint Petersburg. The apartments in the five-story stone tenement house, built in 1906–1907 on the plot closer to the present-day Sredneohtinsky Avenue, became communal under Soviet rule. This house (Bolshaya Porokhovskaya Street, 16/27) is still residential. Together, these two buildings, once owned by merchant Ivanov, are a rare example of Art Nouveau in Bolshaya Okhta.
Sources:
