Description of the attraction
The former dacha suburb of St. Petersburg - Kamenny Island - has preserved to our time the best examples of a unique unique environment, where architectural structures and landscapes form a single ensemble. At the beginning of the last century, a "collection" of unique dachas and mansions in the style of neoclassicism and modernism was formed at this place. Particularly eye-catching is the group of original buildings dating back to the 1900s. in the spirit of neo-romantic modernity. One of them is E. Follenweider's house, built on the bank of the canal, well observed from different points. Visible from afar, it seems to "grow" out of the ground and is one of the visiting cards of the Stone Island.
Eduard Follenweider, a Swiss citizen, was the head of the tailor's workshop, supplier to the imperial court and co-owner of the "Gunry" trading house.
The Follenweider house has a very original, unusual look for us - a kind of an old castle with a multi-pitched roof lined with tiles, a hipped tower - and with all this, the composition of the house is made up of absolutely functional elements, devoid of any special decor.
Architect R.-F. Meltzer designed the mansion in 1905 in the Northern Art Nouveau style, interspersed with Gothic Revival. This variation of the new style was mainly influenced by the romanticism of Scandinavia and Finland. The walls of the building, dazzling white, are emphasized by the broken silhouette of the multi-pitched tiled roof. A monumental facade, a massive tower decorated with a curved tent, a gray granite base and a red tile roof, between them - walls sparkling with their whiteness - the image of the house is filled with plastic expression and romantic flair. The picturesque asymmetrical contours of the house show a kind of dynamics of movement, and the smooth or contrasting articulations of elements and parts - the eternal human striving for high ideals. It may seem that the building is as if casually folded from large volumes of different shapes and heights. This is because each facade has its own original solution, dominated by a monolithic tower, and the tiled roof here, probably for the first time in Petersburg residential architecture, is an active component of the building. Windows, diverse in grouping and pattern - and there are more than ten types of them - create the illusion of perception of different facades of the mansion, as if from different sides, built according to different external plans, when walking around the building.
The first floor of the house is occupied by a living room, an office, a kitchen and a dining room, the second - children's rooms, a library, a bedroom. Unlike many other surviving mansions of Kamenny Island, the interior decoration of the premises has been partially preserved in the Follenweider house: ornamental molding on the ceiling and walls, stained glass windows, marble fireplaces with mirrors and stoves. There is a front staircase with a geometric pattern in the tower.
Popular rumor called the Follenweider house "Teremkom" and "Sugarloaf". Teremkom - because of the high tiled roof, sugarloaf - because of the dazzling white plaster, which used to decorate the walls of the facade.
In Soviet times, the house was a sanatorium "Clinical", specializing in diseases of the gastrointestinal tract. For its Scandinavian look, the Follenweider house was repeatedly filmed in films: in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in The Adventures of Prince Florizel as the Suicide Club, in Mister Designer, as the Grillo house.
From 1993 to 2009, the building housed the Consulate General of Denmark. However, due to high rents, the building had to be vacated. Now a hotel will be set up in the Follenweider house.
