Not far from the Upper Bath is the Lower Bath, or, as it was called in the 18th century, the Cavalier Soap House. This pavilion, located away from the park alleys and intended for courtiers, was built according to the design of architect Neelov in 1778–1779. Its facade is half hidden from the view of garden visitors by trees and shrubs. The Lower Bath consists of ten rooms grouped around a central hall with a large round bath. The water was heated in two boilers, each with separate entrances, and supplied by pipes to the bath and rooms with tubs.

Ilya Neelov based the construction of this facility on motifs of Byzantine baths and employed the best craftsmen—masons and roofers—for the work. The unique architecture of the soap house is a combination of seven cylindrical rooms: the largest room included a pool and six annexes with changing rooms-vestibules and steam baths. The Lower Bath had two of everything: two entrances, two boiler rooms, two steam rooms—serving ladies and cavaliers separately. This was because, correcting Russian traditions of mixed bathing, Empress Catherine introduced the Code of Decency. According to this code, men and women were forbidden to be together in the baths.

A considerable staff was assigned to service the Lower Bath: bath attendants and steamers, those who carried firewood and stokers—all year round they were constantly preparing, drying, heating boilers, and washing-steaming. The Lower Bath is akin to the Upper, the royal one, only more modest in size and room decoration. Unfortunately, no traces of the soap house’s interior decoration have survived to this day. Like a cozy living room with a fireplace, the changing room of this bath was a place where people undressed before washing and also pleasantly spent time between water procedures, sipping tea or kvass. In the steam room, called the “cast-iron room,” cast-iron cores were used, which were quite resistant to temperature fluctuations. The central hall of the Lower Bath had a main advantage—a large pool. Courtiers, cavaliers, and ladies bathed not in ordinary water but in healing water from the Taitsy springs. Water was supplied to the soap house through a 16-kilometer aqueduct.

The original plan of the pavilion determined its external appearance. Its two facades—facing the palace and the opposite side—are identical; neither is the main one. The walls of the central hall rise significantly above the walls of the side rooms and form a light drum on which the dome crowning the building rests. Both on the drum and on the facade walls, round windows are used, located high above the ground in accordance with the functional purpose of the building. The pavilion’s facades, slightly damaged during the Great Patriotic War, were restored in 1944–1945. Fragments of the interior decoration and historic granite baths were preserved in the pavilion. On July 5, 2011, after painstaking restoration, the Lower Bath pavilion was opened to the public. Valuable historical inventories of the furnishings, archaeological research preceding the restoration work, and the preserved volumetric-spatial composition of the building helped scientists and restorers in their work.

The exhibition titled “The Cavalier Soap House of the 21st Century,” built on the principle of what the Bath’s rooms could have been like and what could have filled them, corresponds with 19th-century inventories: the bathrooms contain furniture made of Karelian birch and mahogany, the steam room is lined with linden, the tubs are bound with copper hoops, and the central pool is made of tin. The division of rooms is conditional—although men and women bathed on different days of the week, the pavilion simultaneously houses a women’s bathroom, a men’s bathroom, and even a children’s room. Today’s viewer, often tired of “high” art, gladly peers into the everyday life of a bygone era. Everything interests them—how water was supplied, how the heating was done, where they undressed, where and with what they bathed, where they rested, and what emotions they experienced. Thus, the museum space helps the viewer “peek” at the informal side of life in the imperial residence: they see dresses and shoes, underwear and bathing accessories, including washcloths, sponges, birch and oak brooms, as well as medicinal herbs used in the steam room. But not only objects and bathing accessories create an atmosphere of warmth, comfort, and relaxation here. The pavilion seems to “live”—we hear the sounds of splashing water, quiet indistinct conversations, we are “warmed” by the fire in the fireplaces, enveloped by the scent of pine in the steam room and light floral aromas in the women’s bath.

Sources:

https://peterburg.center/maps/carskoe-selo-nizhnyaya-vanna-kavalerskaya-mylnya.html

https://www.tzar.ru/objects/ekaterininskypark/regular/lowerbathroom