The new winery will be built near the village of Moldovanskoye, Krasnodar Territory, and will become part of the Lefkadia multifunctional tourist complex. The picturesque hilly area with rivers and lakes is the best choice for creating a health resort and planting vineyards, so the idea to combine these functions and create a recreational complex based on winemaking, culture and aesthetics of wine consumption was born of its own accord. At the end of last year, the workshop "Sergei Kiselev & Partners" was invited to participate in a closed competition for the project of the winery, and the customer asked the architects to submit not one, but three versions of this structure. Since all three projects were to be developed very quickly, SK&P decided to work in three groups: Sergey Kiselev himself worked on one of the options, and the heads of the project - Andrey Nikiforov and Viktor Barmin - worked on two others.
As the architects recall, as a technical task they received a situational plan of a very impressive area and intricate landscape, a rigid technological scheme based on the gravitational method of wine production, as well as general wishes of the customer to make the complex a new wine-making and tourist center of the region. It was not difficult to draw “ideological” conclusions from this - the architecture was required to be bright and iconic, containing both a complex technological process and a winemaking museum that could become a magnet for numerous visitors. At the same time, the architects were given complete freedom to locate the object in the allotted territory. Without saying a word, the designers chose as the main "reference point" the existing high hill on the site (the height difference between its top and base is 24 meters), around which an old country road winds and a new one has already been laid. But the relationship of this natural dominant and the projected object in each of the three cases developed differently, and later, comparing the solutions for the winery, Sergey Kiselev and his colleagues saw that they had created a “house under the mountain”, “a house by the mountain” and “a house on the mountain". This is exactly how - according to the landscape principle - they later began to call their projects.
"House under the Mountain" - the idea of Sergei Kiselev. Colleagues recall that the territory allocated for the creation of "Lefkadia" impressed the architect so much with its pristine beauty that he firmly decided to preserve the existing landscape as much as possible. The winery is completely dug into the hill and covered with a roof imitating a green slope. In fact, the building, which by its scale and functional program can easily claim the status of a plant, is disguised as a fold of the terrain. One can guess about the man-madeness of this "fold" only from one of the side facades, which is designed as a glass curtain.
The trick here is that the building-hill is planted close to the natural rather steep slope and adds a new expressive roundness to its profile. Kiselev uses the green terrace that appeared due to the roof to create an open pedestrian gallery and observation deck, and this long captain's bridge is a kind of pivot connecting the production halls located below and the museum located above and hidden in the already existing hill. The author likened the exhibition space itself to an adit, and designated the entrance to it with a high glass cone, which from afar will be perceived as the only noticeable landmark indicating the location of the new complex. After examining the exhibits telling about the history of winemaking in the Krasnodar Territory, visitors can go through the already mentioned gallery to the production building and, slowly going down the multi-march staircase, see with their own eyes the whole process of making wine.
The second variant of the winery's solution - “house by the mountain” - was developed by Andrey Nikiforov's group. For her, the starting point in her search for the image of the building was the character of the existing slope. “It not only grows into the slope, but repeats its existing terraces. In fact, a house was made, which is more an accomplishment than a building - a house consisting of retaining walls, - explains Andrey Nikiforov. “Thanks to this, he acquired a rather brutal, in some ways, perhaps, even a serf appearance, but on the other hand he does not creep up in a sharp silhouette.” Indeed, only the laconic one-story volume of the wine press rises above the existing hill, that is, the room into which fresh grapes arrive and begin to be processed. Placing workshops on separate terraces allowed the architects to solve the difficult task of organizing transport access to each of them. And on the lowest level, where the winery's offices and tasting room are located, there is a parking lot for buses and cars. And if the production of wine itself is likened to giant steps carved into a rocky slope, then a museum dedicated to the creation of the elixir of Bacchus can be compared to a narrow ladder. The exhibition halls occupy a much smaller area than the workshops, but they are also built into the walls and descend the slope with ledges - in fact, they are located parallel to the main production so that it can become a full-fledged object of display.
And, finally, the “house on the mountain” is the fruit of Victor Barmin's thoughts. He admits that the image of the building was born from the desire to oppose a new volume to the surrounding landscape, to put a “sugar cube” on the top of a steep slope and thereby fill the “soft” natural composition with a new sound. At the same time, the lower, most voluminous part of the winery is nevertheless hidden in the relief - there is simply no other way to balance the large technological volume with the natural environment. On the surface, Barmin leaves only the two upper floors of the production, clearly oriented towards the downward slope, and to the rest it brings wide porch terraces that surround the building with a spectacular symmetrical fan.
As in the two previous versions, the reception of excursion groups begins at the top level, only in this case a separate volume is designed for this purpose - a "tower", from which visitors can climb to the level of the roof of the main building. While Kiselev and Nikiforov were designing some kind of hybrids of production and the museum, Viktor Barmin abandoned the actual exposition part altogether, integrating the excursion route directly into the winery. So, from the tower the guests of the complex walk along the "view" terrace to the well-maintained operated roof, where an indispensable attribute of any wine production is located - the tasting room. It is designed in the form of a narrow horizontal parallelepiped, laid across the "boxes" of the main production that grow out of the ground. The decorative ponds on the two upper terraces, the sheds above them and the supports that decorate the entrances to the lower levels of the complex are also emphasized geometric. The massiveness and severity of the entire composition is compensated by the snow-white "sugar" color and the rings of the terraces, giving it lightness and completeness, organically weaving the complex into the multifaceted landscape of the Krasnodar Territory.
