The building is located in the back of the block, not far from Yakimanka and Igumnov's house belonging to the French embassy. It is built on all sides and constrained by neighboring houses, alternating in their not too sophisticated outfits, modern red brick with modern modern facing tiles of the early 20th century. However, the house can be seen quite well from Spasonalivkovsky lane - because there is a small one-story house, also of the beginning of the 20th century, which cannot block anything.
So, in 1912, in the depths of one of the courtyards near Yakimanka, a four-story apartment building was built with large windows and vertical walls covered with light tiles between them, with large apartments of two per floor and with a driveway arch in the middle leading further into the courtyard. Then, in 1932, it was built on two floors, extending the verticals of the former facade higher, but with the help of only one plaster. The arch was laid, and communal apartments were made in the apartments. The house stood in this form until 2002 - after which it was reconstructed.
During the reconstruction, all the outer walls of the 1912 building were preserved, and almost all that remained of the modest and austere southern facade facing the side street. The main staircase inside was replaced with a monolithic reinforced concrete structure that unites the staircase and the elevator. Therefore, the bay window of the southern facade, which included part of the staircase, was removed, replacing it with a vertical row of solid stained-glass windows illuminating the new staircase. This façade has become somewhat flatter and more graphic than it was. Note that the rest of the facade remains very similar to the previous one - even the window frames are made dark brown, and not bright white, as is often the case.
On the opposite side, the house, on the contrary, received a solid new ledge - a brick projection, which increased the internal area of the apartments. As befits a neoplasm, it has a different color and texture - the old part of the house is yellowish-gray, the new one is red-brick. It has more glass - the windows are taller and wider and, in addition, the corners of the new volume are occupied by the windows in a constructvist manner - thus, the apartments here receive maximum daylight, which can be enjoyed on the north side. At the level of the second floor, there is a fully glazed semicircular ledge - from where a panoramic view of the adjacent courtyard opens. Moving out into the courtyard, the risalit seeks to capture a little more space, throwing out, with an interval of one floor, closed cantilever balconies that revive the plane and add a few more meters.
In addition to the reconstruction of the staircase, during the reconstruction two built-up floors of 1932 were dismantled - and in their place were built five new, four ordinary and one attic. In order to pay tribute to the memory of the dismantled two floors, in the place where the building used to end, a cornice is arranged - above it, the tiled facing ends, giving way to plaster.
The uppermost floor, decorated with round columns and receding from the plane of the facade, slightly from the south, and much from the north, forming a deep and comfortable terrace from the side of the courtyard, which will go to the owners of the most luxurious upper apartments. These two penthouses will be two-tier, they will own the eighth and ninth attic floors, the above-mentioned terrace and views of the city from it - directly and directly towards the Kremlin. The rest of the apartments return to their Art Nouveau dimensions, with the addition of an attached projection. It can be said that the apartment building was literally reborn in double its size, in order to become part of the elite development of renewed capitalism.
The resulting building is clearly an enlargement renovation. However, among its own kind, it stands out for its rare calmness and integrity of the architectural solution to the problem, which is a very neat symbiosis of the remnants of a genuine example of rational modernism, stylization for it, elements of a very restrained postmodernism - its representatives are the columns of the attic floor and the techniques of constructivist architecture - in the form of corner windows. Primarily responsible for stylization are cast-iron lattices with geometric patterns of intersecting lines, successfully combining simplicity and delicacy. They enclose the upper terraces and all high windows starting from the floor, thus combining the security function and the main element of the facade decoration. The new staircase is decorated with very similar railings, which in general outlines the shape of the old one. Lattices appear in front of the vertical stained-glass windows on the south facade and in front of almost all windows on the north, linking the two-part house, old and new, into one whole. Considering the combination of gratings, neat geometry of brick and old tiles, consoles, corner windows and columns at the top, we can say that the unification is happening somewhere at the level of the Art Deco style - which is partly logical, because if you add up the beginning of the XX and XXI centuries, and then divide in half, then something like this will turn out.
