Stenbok-Fermor Income House
History
1902
Happily, most income houses from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the masterpieces of Petersburg Art Nouveau have come down to us in all their architectural splendor. They constitute a rich cultural legacy and a striking example of creative approaches to residential development in Saint Petersburg.
Stenbok-Fermor Income House
Zvenigorodskaya 2 / Zagorodny 44
Thanks for the eloquent façades at the corner of Zvenigorodskaya Street and Zagorodny Prospekt are due to the architect Lev Petrovich Shishko. Curiously, when Countess Maria Aleksandrovna Stenbok-Fermor commissioned him in 1902 to design an income house, there was not a single such building in the thirty-year-old architect’s portfolio—he had previously worked on religious buildings, schools, and hospitals. Shishko worked extensively, including for the Nikolaev Railway and the Alexander Nevsky Lavra; yet the house at Zvenigorodskaya and Zagorodny became his largest and most famous work.
The client behind the construction was Countess Maria Aleksandrovna Stenbok-Fermor (née Apraksina). The Stenboks and Fermors are two ancient noble families of Northern Europe united by marriage. In the Russian Empire the counts owned vast estates, Ural metallurgical works, numerous income houses, and several mansions in the capital. At the end of the nineteenth century the head of the clan was Vladimir Aleksandrovich Stenbok-Fermor—an alumnus of the Alexandrovsky Lyceum, a hussar, and a veteran of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. It was his second wife, Maria Aleksandrovna, who commissioned and owned the house at the corner of Zagorodny and Zvenigorodskaya.
The architect Lev P. Shishko (1872–1943) built the house in 1902–1903 and himself lived there from 1903 to 1908. He designed prolifically both before and after the Revolution—residential, educational, and industrial buildings. He was also a professor at IGI and taught at the Mining and Electrotechnical Institutes, the Academy of Arts, and the Baron Stieglitz School of Technical Drawing; from 1915 to 1920 he headed the Technological Institute, and from 1909 until his death he taught at the Institute of Railway Engineers.
Income house
An income house is a multi-apartment residential building constructed to rent out apartments—a type that took shape in European countries by the 1830s–1840s. Apartments were usually grouped around stairwells, corridors, or galleries and tended to be uniform in plan. Income houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries typically had a small inner courtyard-well; the rest of the lot was occupied by the building itself, with utility rooms often below the courtyard. As a rule, only the principal façade facing the street received full decorative treatment. Owners could be private individuals or institutions seeking steady income—schools, orphanages, monasteries, and both commercial and charitable societies. Purpose-built income houses began to be erected in Saint Petersburg in the mid-nineteenth century and make up a significant part of the city’s pre-revolutionary fabric. By the early twentieth century, about 80% of the city’s buildings were income houses, fitted with the most advanced systems—lifts, steam heating, and electricity—and boasting functional, carefully considered layouts.
An income house was Petersburg in miniature: all social strata lived side by side—nobility, merchants, townspeople, men of miscellaneous ranks, and aristocrats. A house could be read as a hierarchy of its inhabitants, a layered cross-section of society by means and occupation. Well-to-do officials and employees tended to rent apartments along the outer façades; those along the inner perimeter went to people of miscellaneous ranks. Fashionable shopkeepers occupied the ground floor; clerks commonly lived on the second. The third floor was most prestigious; the higher you went, the more modest the tenants—and even the ceremonial staircase grew plainer. Attics, mansards, and outbuildings were taken by students and lower ranks; basements and semi-basements might be rented to the urban poor or used as workshops.
Address and surroundings
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Our house stands at the corner of Zvenigorodskaya Street and Zagorodny Prospekt. The latter takes its name from the great “Road Beyond the City,” laid in the early 1730s along an old footpath to Ekateringof. It was “beyond the city” because, in the first half of the eighteenth century—when the southern boundary of the city ran along the Fontanka—the adjacent areas lay outside it. The official name was established in 1739 by the Commission for the Construction of Saint Petersburg; the modern form, Zagorodny Prospekt, is attested from 1798.
One photo shows that the Conradi firm’s shop occupied most of our house’s ground floor, with an entrance on the corner of Zagorodny and Zvenigorodskaya. Run by the Russo-Swiss merchant of the first guild, Viktor Conradi, the network offered a wide assortment: cooking chocolate, cocoa, boxed chocolate “with booklets,” chocolate candies and pastilles, fruit candies, caramels, dragees, marmalade, pastila, jellies, and gingerbread. Conradi was renowned for high packaging standards and vivid posters.
Nearby on Zagorodny stood a Singer company store. In Russia these famous sewing machines were sold in more than 3,000 branded shops across the Empire; thanks to their excellent quality, Singer earned the right to be styled “Purveyor to His Imperial Majesty’s Court.”
From our windows you can also see the Vitebsky Railway Station—one of the city’s first public buildings in the Art Nouveau style. The project by the architect Stanislav Brzozowskiwas considered highly innovative for its extensive use of metal structures alongside traditional materials. The new Tsarskoselsky (former name) station was solemnly consecrated on 1 August 1904 and was immediately acclaimed; to this day it remains the most beautiful of the city’s five railway complexes.
Special attention should be paid to the interior and décor of our front staircase. The stove in the staircase was designed by the eminent Finnish-Swedish designer Louis Sparre, a proponent of Karelianism — a search for inspiration for new northern art in the remote villages and forests of Karelia. Like all the building’s stoves, it was made by the Åbo factory. Sadly, the stove — like other elements of the staircase décor — remains in poor condition and awaits restoration. Yet one can still trace the unity of plant motifs in the wrought-iron elements of the staircase, the floor tiles, the plasterwork, and the remnants of stained glass above the entrance doors. Archival photos show that floral motifs adorned the apartments as well — plaster, wall painting, and stained glass were executed uniformly throughout the house — but today they are almost entirely lost.
How were income-house apartments heated?
Apartments were heated with Dutch stoves and round tiled stoves; fireplaces in Petersburg were valued mostly for beauty, not practicality. Stoves could warm the air to a fairly high temperature, but it wasn’t considered necessary — 17 °C indoors was the norm. The turn of the century coincided with the flowering of Art Nouveau across Europe; Finland developed its own strand, National Romanticism. At least a dozen Finnish factories produced ceramics and majolica for stoves and fireplaces, much of it for the Russian market—examples survive in old Saint Petersburg houses to this day. One of the best known was Åbo, which made all the stoves in our house. One photograph shows the famed stove nicknamed in Finland koivu-uuni — the “birch stove” — for its relief décor of stylized trees and birch leaves with catkins. Designed in 1902 by the architectural bureau Usko Nyström–Petrelius–Penttilä, it was installed the same year in the Stenbok-Fermor income house. The “birch stove” is undeniably a monument of early twentieth-century applied art and artistic industry.
