Nikonov Apartment House
Apartment Buildings
Famed for its palaces and museums and thoroughly imbued with an air of past glories, St. Petersburg is, in broad historical terms, a very modern city. Its development coincided with the general European trend for urbanization and the adoption of the apartment as the main style of accommodation for city dwellers. By the mid-19th century, only a tiny percentage of the population at the very top of the social ladder could afford to live in private houses, and the vast majority of Petersburgers were moving to rented accommodation in apartment buildings.
The "dokhodny dom" (tenement building) was not only the easiest way to accommodate the city's rapidly growing population, it was also an attractive investment for St. Petersburg's wealthy merchants and industrialists, and even for many members of the aristocracy. Apartment buildings, usually of four or five stories and with a small inner courtyard, began to spring up throughout the historic centre, bearing the names of the prominent citizens who had commissioned them.
The owners would often have their commercial premises and their own apartments on the lower floors of the building, with the second floor traditionally occupied by the most luxurious living quarters, and apartments decreasing in size and splendor the higher the floor.
As for many owners the apartment building would be their own home as well as a business project, they were generally willing to spend lavishly on decoration and design. There are numerous masterpieces of eclectic, revival, Art Nouveau and Russian Neo-classical architecture among the St. Petersburg apartment buildings of the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Sources of architects' inspiration ranged from classical temples to Venetian palaces and medieval castles, and in some cases the elaborate decorations became synonymous with the buildings themselves, so that names like "the house with towers" or "the house with owls" have an almost official status in local nomenclature.
The grand era of apartment houses in St. Petersburg came to an abrupt end with the October Revolution. With the honorable exception of a few ground-breaking constructivist housing projects of the late 1920s and a handful of neighborhoods that benefited from the Stalinist construction boom of the 1950s, the main Soviet solutions to the housing problem were to first slice up the palaces, mansions and grand lodgings of the pre-Revolutionary elite into cramped communal apartments, and later to throw up the endless rows of monotonous prefabricated blocks that comprise most of St. Petersburg's dormitory regions.
Nonetheless, it is the comparative lack of 20th century construction projects that has allowed St. Petersburg to retain the historic aspect of the city centre like a museum of the pre-Revolutionary era, a fact recognized by UNESCO's decision to designate the whole area a world heritage site in 1990. While many of St. Petersburg's historic buildings have been shockingly abused and neglected over the last century, the sense of living amongst the decaying grandeur of a past civilization has an insidious charm that seduces locals and visitors alike. In this respect, St. Petersburg truly is the "Venice of the North", and nowhere is the juxtaposition of modern living and the social order and design of the past more tangibly experienced than in the city's grand historic apartment buildings.
With the obvious and prominent exception of the Church of Our Saviour on the Spilled Blood, there are not many buildings in St. Petersburg in the Russian Revival style of the late 19th century, and most of them are churches in the outlying regions of the historic centre. A remarkable exception is the Nikonov Apartment House on Kolokoknaya Ulitsa, a few steps from the Church of the Vladimir Icon of the Mother of God.

Nikonov Apartment Building on Kolokolnaya Ulitsa
The owner and designer of the building, Nikolay Nikonov, was a leading proponent of the Russian Revival style, responsible for many notable churches and monasteries in Moscow, Tallinn, Poltava, New Athos (in Abkhazia), on the island of Valaam, and in St. Petersburg and its suburbs. Nikonov's most famous Petersburg work is the Convent of St. John of Rila on the Karpovka River Emankment on the Petrograd Side. Another excellent example of his work, the Church of the Holy Trinity, stood only a few minutes' walk from his apartment building on the corner of Ulitsa Marata and Stremyannaya Ulitsa, but was demolished in 1964 during the construction of Moskovskaya Metro Station.

Detail of facade decorations of the Nikonov Apartment Building
In 1899, Nikonov acquired the merchant Zimin's two-story house on Kolokolnaya Ulitsa and rebuilt it to reach five stories. In decorating his building, Nikonov gave free rein to his imagination. Using ceramics made at the renowned Nikolay Gogol School of Technical Art in Ukraine, Nikonov decorated almost every brick on the facade of his house. Windows, cornices, columns, and balconies were all decked out with colorful majolica decorations, mostly floral ornaments. A tent-like roof, "melon" columns, and "kokoshniki" (arch-like semi-circular decorations named after a traditional type of headgear) combined to make the building almost an encyclopedia of traditional Russian architecture.

Nikonov Apartment Building: Entrance to a fairy-tale house
Nikonov's decorative zeal extended to the interiors and courtyard of his building. Inside can be found stained-glass windows with floral patterns reminiscent of Art Deco, vaulted ceilings, and decorative plasterwork. Unlike many St. Petersburg houses, the courtyard's facades are decorated although more modestly than the main facade. In the courtyard, reached through a vaulted brick archway, a charming semi-circular tower houses one of the building's staircases.
After a fire in the building in 2009, the main facade has been fully restored.