Kronverksky Ave., 77, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 197198
In 1911–1912, a house in the Art Nouveau style was built according to the design of Karl Karlovich Schmidt, a representative of the "brick style" architect. The client was the wealthy sugar factory owner Leopold Egorovich König. At various times, the Königs owned quite a few "real estate objects" in the capital. The house turned out to be rather heavy-looking, with a round tower on the roof featuring windows all around.
The main facade is decorated with two stylized images of large owls with long beaks. Before the 1917 revolution, it housed the Treiberg umbrella factory, a supplier to the Imperial Court. Additionally, there was a city private infirmary managed by Empress Alexandra. The facade of the building stands out with large-scale decorative details. The house has two inner courtyards and ten light wells. The architectural and artistic design of the front facades has been preserved with minor losses and changes. The internal structure of the building retains the complex historic decoration of the grand stairwell volumes.
But the unique biography of the owner of this house undoubtedly deserves a separate story.
Leopold Egorovich (Georg Leopold) König (1821–1903) was born in Saint Petersburg into the family of a baker, who, being the third son of the owner of a small mill near Erfurt, could not claim any inheritance. In 1812, he came to try his luck on the banks of the Neva. In 1817, he opened his own business (a bakery, flour warehouse, and pastry shop) on Vasilievsky Island, where the family settled. But in 1837, a fire destroyed almost all of his property. By that time, Leopold had graduated from Hirst's English boarding school and dreamed of becoming an architect, but due to circumstances, he had to go into business, essentially starting from scratch.
The capable young man took a job at Karl Pammel's sugar factory and soon became the owner's first assistant. Then he became the chief master at a similar but larger enterprise owned by merchant Prokofy Ponomarev. In 1848, he borrowed 27,000 rubles from representatives of the St. Petersburg German community and bought his first factory (one of the smallest among 28 sugar enterprises in the capital of the Russian Empire). After König's reorganization, the factory nearly doubled its output.
In the first half of the 19th century, sugar production was arguably the most profitable business sector in St. Petersburg. Two factors contributed to this. First, the colossal growth in demand for this product, which actively displaced the traditional sweetener for Russians—honey. Second, sugar was then made only from cane, which was shipped by sea from overseas, mainly through the port of the capital of the Russian Empire.
Later, König sold his first factory and leased a larger one. To study new sugar production technologies (steam system instead of fire), he went to Hamburg, where he worked as a simple laborer at a leading industry enterprise. Upon returning to St. Petersburg, he acquired a sugar factory in Ekateringof and fully modernized it for the new technology by 1857. In 1862, König bought a sugar factory located on the shore of the Bolshaya Nevka for 375,000 rubles, employing 500 people.
With the advent of sugar production technology from beets, i.e., local raw materials, in the 1870s König acquired lands in the Kharkov province, which gradually reached 40,000 desyatins. There, two sugar factories and one refinery were established. The arable lands supplied raw materials for them, and the forest lands supported a specially created parquet production.
The place of sugar cane in the turnover of the St. Petersburg port was gradually taken by cotton imported from America. König transformed his sugar factory in Ekateringof into a paper-spinning factory.
By the beginning of the 20th century, König's enterprises had an annual turnover of 40 million rubles. In particular, they accounted for almost one-tenth of all refined sugar produced in Russia. In Sharovka (about 60 kilometers from Kharkov), he built a villa; the house and part of the huge park have survived to this day. In St. Petersburg, he owned six houses. Moreover, the "sugar king" often lived in Germany. In Bonn, he built a villa, which König sold in the late 1880s to industrialist Rudolf Hammerschmidt. In 1950, the impressive mansion became the official residence of the President of the Federal Republic of Germany (and remains so after the relocation of the unified Germany’s government to Berlin—as a backup office for the head of state).
König's tombstone at the Volkovo Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg
His business was inherited by five sons, who organized the partnership "L.E. König – Heirs" (more than a dozen beet sugar, sugar refinery, distillery, brick, lumber processing, horse factories, and mills). In 1913, the total number of employees at these enterprises exceeded 20,000 people. In 1918, all were nationalized, and the large König family left Russia.
Sources:
https://rodinananeve.ru/dom-saharnogo-korolya-na-vasilevskom-sladkaya-zhizn/
