Description of the attraction
House of Baron Hildebrand is one of the most beautiful buildings in Kiev, and it bears this title quite deservedly. This house, located at Shovkovichnaya, 19, cannot fail to attract the attention of even the indigenous people of Kiev, not to mention the guests of the city. The building owes this property to the genius of its architect - Nikolai Vishnevsky, who in 1901 fulfilled the order of Baron Vladimir Ikskül-Hildebrand, who needed a “tenement house”. This is how houses were called at the beginning of the twentieth century, the apartments of which were originally intended for renting out to tenants.
Why is this house so visible? To blame everything on the architect's talent, which undoubtedly took place, would, of course, be wrong. The case is explained by the rules of construction that reigned then: the more original the project was and the sooner the developer promised to erect the building, the sooner it was approved. It is not surprising that at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries it was simply impossible to find the now familiar “typical” twin concrete boxes. Naturally, the architect himself knew about these rules, so he tried to do everything so that his creation was atypical for Kiev and immediately caught the eye.
Noticing that the city, to put it mildly, is not replete with buildings made in the Gothic style, which is simply not typical for Kiev, Vishnevsky decided to correct this annoying misunderstanding. The origin of the customer also helped the business - the baron was a descendant of the Estonian family (this can be seen from the emblem preserved on the facade of the building), so such architecture would be familiar to him.
For more than a century of existence, the house of Baron Hildebrand has gone through a lot - it burned during the war, lost its graceful Gothic spiers, famous writers lived in it and even filmed films. Today the house is being restored according to the surviving drawings and photographs, and is preparing to receive new tenants.
