The first information about the development and surveying of the lands dates back to the early 1720s. At that time, the lands with the villages Malinovka and Zhernovka belonged to the stolnik Fyodor Buturlin, from whom they were inherited by Ivan Ivanovich Buturlin. The estate was then called "Buturlin's dacha," but there is no evidence of any construction. In 1739, after Buturlin's death, the new owner became the Ober-Procurator of the Senate Fyodor Ivanovich Soymonov. Ten years later, he sold the lands to the actual Privy Councillor Alexey Grigorievich Zherebtsov. During this period, the estate received the name "Zhernovka." There is a hypothesis that one of the estate's owners was Peter the Great's personal turner, the inventor Nartov, but no documentary evidence has been found. There is only indirect confirmation — in May 1756, an announcement was published in the "Saint Petersburg Gazette" that Nartov's sons were selling a manor on the Vyborg side of Spernovka, which was presumably Zhernovka.

Documents about the subsequent period in the estate's history are contradictory. Many researchers claim that in 1786 the estate was acquired by Mikhail Donaur, who once served as secretary and personal librarian to Paul I.

The main construction took place at the estate in the 1790s. Between 1794 and 1796, the main manor house with two wings topped with turrets was built on the steep bank of the Okhta River. The project is attributed to Giacomo Quarenghi. Although some researchers consider Nikolay Lvov or Yuri Felten the creators of the estate complex, at least the drawing of the pavilion at the pier is definitely Quarenghi's work and is signed by the architect. Additionally, the Sforza Museum in Milan holds a signed Quarenghi drawing of an estate identical to Zhernovka and two similar variants of the pier with a pavilion. In this case, the authors of the interior paintings in the main mansion could have been Quarenghi's regular collaborators Antonio della Giacomo or Carlo Scotti.

The main mansion of the estate had five formal rooms — a hall, a living room, a dining room, a billiard room, and a bedroom. The interiors widely used stucco and gilding; the walls were painted to imitate marble, Venetian doors and tiled stoves were installed, and the walls and ceiling plafonds were richly decorated with paintings and bas-reliefs. One entire wall of the living room was occupied by a huge fresco panel depicting the Gatchina Palace. The estate was surrounded by a landscaped park with a pond and a stone pier; there were also three greenhouses, a cherry orchard, icehouses, sheds, stables, and a bread store on the grounds. All the utility buildings were decorated in the Chinese style, similar to the decoration used in Gatchina and Pavlovsk.

Mikhail's land was inherited by his uncle Gavrila Gerasimovich, and in 1802 by his son Pavel Gavrilovich. In 1806, through a court decision, the estate was acquired by Colonel F. M. Poltoratsky. At the same time, Senate archives contain evidence that on June 21, 1788, Zhernovka was inherited from Alexey Zherebtsov by his sister, State Councillor Natalya Alexeevna Zherebtsova, married name Chekalevskaya. There is a decree from Emperor Alexander I approving the surveying of the manor Zhernovka dated September 23, 1811, which was owned by Natalya Alexeevna's husband, Vice-President of the Imperial Academy of Arts Pyotr Chekalevsky.

In 1827, Emperor Nicholas I transferred Zhernovka to the merchant Sevastyan Venediktovich Kramer. Under this owner, the main mansion was expanded; the estate began growing vegetables and fruits for sale and organized a dairy farm. From 1838, the owner of the manor (then called Gavrilovka) was the wife of General-Adjutant Sukhozanet, Ekaterina Alexandrovna (daughter of Prince A. M. Beloselsky). Zhernovka became the dowry of her daughter Anna, who married N. A. Bezobrazov in 1844. The estate was then called the Bezobrazov dacha, and the manor was renamed Ekaterininskaya. Ekaterina Alexandrovna lived almost constantly abroad, so in 1858 she handed over the management of the estate to her son-in-law, Anna's husband Nikolay Alexandrovich Bezobrazov. During his management, a school for peasant children was opened. After his departure abroad, the estate was managed by Privy Councillor Sokrat Remezov. After her death, the heirs divided the estate into two parts; 655 desyatins of land and the manor went to Anna Bezobrazova.

Anna Bezobrazova died in Lausanne in 1895; her daughter M. N. Bezobrazova lived in Nice and suffered from mental illness, so the estate was managed by her guardian, Actual State Councillor Alexander Mikhailovich Bezobrazov. In the early 20th century, Zhernovka was rented out as summer cottages, and one of Nikolay Alexandrovich's sons equipped a testing ground on the estate and conducted artillery tests. By the beginning of World War I, the estate had fallen into decline.

The large manor house, designed by the outstanding architect Giacomo Quarenghi, was built on the left bank of the Okhta by 1796. The building is located almost perpendicular to the river flow so that its rooms have a beautiful view of the river, the bridge, and the now-lost gates with turrets (they were located northeast of the house, at the crossroads of roads leading to the villages of Malinovka and Zhernovka).

The second facade faced the English landscape park, laid out simultaneously with the house's construction. At that time, in the late 18th century, romantic sprawling parks with seemingly "randomly" placed (but actually deliberately planted by gardeners in specific spots) tall trees, winding paths, and picturesque ponds became fashionable in Russia. The manor house in Zhernovka practically stands on one of these artificial ponds, reflecting its most formal facade with huge two-story "Venetian" semicircular windows.

English parks were an integral part of estates of that time, almost as important as the house itself. Now the banks of the pond and the artificial island are densely overgrown with shrubs and birches. But once a path led from the house's portico to an ancient oak, and around the park, along a deep moat with a stream, ran an alley of birches and lindens. Another alley stretched along the steep bank of the Okhta and led to a stone pier that served as a park pavilion. This pier was called "belle-vue" or "milovzor" because it offered a wonderful view of the river. Picturesque groups of ancient trees were scattered on the lawn in the middle of the park, with cast-iron benches standing beneath them.

The 18th-century manor house consists of three parts: a central part and two wings, lowered relative to the main volume. The symmetrical compact volume of the building refers us to so-called Palladian architecture (named after the great Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio), especially fashionable in England during the Classicism era. The main facade of the building is decorated with a pediment supported by four Corinthian columns. In the 1820s, under the Narva first guild merchant Kramer, long galleries ending with turrets were added on both sides of the manor house; these turrets were once decorated with ceramic vases and sculptures.

The central (oldest) part of the house was entirely devoted to an enfilade of formal rooms arranged on one axis so that one could move from one richly decorated room to another without passing through corridors or "non-formal" rooms. In the center of the building is a large hall two stories high, whose main decorations are huge Venetian windows and a ceiling painting, apparently contemporary with the house's construction. This painting imitates stucco (in fact, all ceilings in the building are flat) and is done in the style of the Classicism dominant at the time.

On one side of the main hall, where festive dinners and concerts could be held, were the living room and dining room; on the other side — the billiard room and bedroom. On one of the living room walls, as late as the 1920s, there remained (though in poor condition) a painting depicting the Gatchina Palace. The subject of this painting allowed Nikolay Yevgenyevich Lansere, who visited Zhernovka in 1924, to suggest that it was created no earlier than the year of the palace's construction and no later than the year of its reconstruction. The living room had gilded cornices with very fine carving and a frieze of Mercury heads in medallions. The corners of the living room were decorated with tiled stoves. Behind the living room was the dining room — a high square room once separated from the living room by a glazed arch on two wooden Ionic columns painted to imitate marble. The ceiling here, as in other formal rooms, was painted: decorated with a plafond in the form of a flat dome with radiating coffers, putti figures, and other elements imitating bas-reliefs and sculptural decor in the then-popular grisaille technique.

In the billiard room, located on the other side of the large hall, the ceiling also had a painted plafond depicting the goddess Venus with cupids and doves. The last formal room in the enfilade was the bedroom, whose walls were painted in the "Pompeian style." The bedroom's plafond design is very complex: it has two intersecting coffered vaults, with their center covered by a blue peplum with a gold border. In the corners of the entire plafond are bronze female figures. This is an imitation of small sculpture, often found in Empire interiors, for example, in candelabra or bronze furniture decor. The mixing of these motifs — Empire and Pompeian painting, decorative vases and niches with shells, Greek ornaments, and the pictorial imitation of bronze — is very characteristic of late 18th-century paintings.

Behind the formal rooms were the entrance hall and four rooms. From one of them, a steep wooden staircase leads to the low upper floor, which has only three rooms that made up the "owner's study." The glazed galleries added to the main building volume in the 1820s housed kitchens, laundries, and greenhouses.

Zhernovka was a typical recreational dacha for its time. The main manor house, consisting entirely of formal rooms, could never be called comfortable for living, and the heating installed allowed warming the rooms with high ceilings and large windows only in warm autumn and late spring. The owners visited Zhernovka for short stays to enjoy nature.

The lands related to the estate served some owners to supply vegetables and dairy products to their tables in Petersburg, while others, at a later time, managed to make a profit by selling products through managers and stewards.

Having experienced its heyday at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries, Zhernovka gradually began to lose its former attractiveness as a place of rest from the second half of the 19th century. It finally lost it after the construction of the Irinovskaya railway (in close proximity to the manor house) in 1890–1892.

During the days of the February Revolution, the gardens and the main house suffered from arson. Already in 1917, it was turned into a club for factory workers; in 1923, part of the park lands was given over to arable land, for which some trees were cut down. In 1929, the estate was transferred to the 2nd Convoy Regiment; a horse veterinary clinic and cowshed were arranged in the main house. From 1931, the building was under the Museum Department of the People's Commissariat for Education; in 1933, a sovkhoz dormitory was opened there, for which most of the interior rooms were replanned and divided by partitions. During this period, the entrance gates were dismantled, and the tiled stoves of the mansion's formal halls were destroyed. In 1938, the house was handed over as a dormitory for the Okhta woodworking plant; most of the interior rooms were replanned, the wings were rebuilt, and the pavilion with the tower was dismantled, resulting in the loss of wall and ceiling paintings. After World War II, the landscaped park ceased to exist.

In 1950, the estate was taken under state protection and partially restored twice. The last restoration began in 1973, led by architect O. V. Shamraeva, and lasted ten years. At that time, the formal hall and bedroom were restored, new trees were partially planted in the park, and the pond was cleared. In the post-Soviet period, the estate was leased with the obligation to carry out restoration work, which, however, was not performed.

Since 2001, the estate has been a federally significant architectural monument.

Sources:

http://krasnakarta.ru/spot/id/14/bezobraz

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дача_Безобразовых