Ushkova House

Ushkova House is one of the most lavishly decorated mansions in Kazan’s historic centre, a federally protected cultural heritage site on Kremlyovskaya Street opposite the university’s main building. The building is famous less for its exterior than for its surviving interiors, each decorated in its own historical style — a rare example, for provincial Russia, of such decorative diversity under a single roof.

The mansion originated as a wedding gift: Alexei Ushkov, son of Konstantin Ushkov, co-owner of chemical works, and grandson of the tea merchant Alexander Gubkin, married Zinaida Vysotskaya, daughter of the professor of surgical pathology Nikolai Vysotsky, and commissioned the rebuilding of three houses on what was then Voskresenskaya Street from the architect Karl Müfke, who taught at the Kazan art school and university. The work took place in 1904–1908 and was not easy for the architect: in 1906 a local newspaper reported his fall from the scaffolding, after which he returned to work despite broken ribs. The building’s round corner bay window echoed the outline of the Resurrection Cathedral standing opposite, and the house itself was fitted organically into the university quarter’s streetscape.

The two-storey plastered building forms an open quadrangle in plan, with shallow projecting bays; the ground floor, finished in rusticated stonework, was given over to shops with large display windows, while the upper floor, linked by an enfilade of formal rooms, served as living quarters. The façade is decorated with stucco eagles and dragons, wrought-iron balcony railings and ornate window pediments. Inside, the halls are decorated in various turn-of-the-century styles: an Empire-style drawing room with Napoleonic monograms, a Gothic dining room with oak panelling, a Rococo-style boudoir, a Moorish hall with doors bearing Arabic calligraphy, and the famous grotto hall, its ceiling hung with artificial stalactites and its walls faced with shell limestone. The grand staircase was painted in the chinoiserie manner and decorated with stained glass by the French master Charles Champigneulle.

After the 1917 revolution the Ushkovs’ property was nationalized, and in 1919 the mansion was handed over to the Central Provincial Library, one of the largest in the Volga region. The house received the status of an architectural monument at the republican level in 1961 and at the federal level in 1995, by decree of the Russian president. The library, later reorganized into the National Library of Tatarstan, occupied the building for over a century.

Surveys carried out in recent decades have revealed serious structural wear: groundwater and the site’s particular terrain, which leave the house’s walls prone to dampness, have taken their toll, and in 2020 the library moved to a new building. The restoration project for the mansion passed state expert review in 2024, and a year later the building was transferred to the Svyazinvestneftekhim company, which is obliged to carry out emergency stabilization and restoration works over several years. Despite the change of owner and the repairs ahead, Ushkova House remains one of the most valuable monuments of civil architecture and interior design from the early 20th century in Kazan.