Arseny Morozov Mansion

The Arseny Morozov Mansion stands on Vozdvizhenka Street and is considered one of the most unusual buildings of pre-revolutionary Moscow: its whimsical façade, with towers and Neo-Moorish stucco ornament, stands out amid the classical architecture of the center. Today the building serves as a government reception house for official events and diplomatic meetings.

The plot on Vozdvizhenka had previously been occupied by a wooden equestrian circus that burned down in 1892. The land was bought by the businesswoman Varvara Morozova, who then transferred it to her son Arseny, a member of a wealthy merchant dynasty. In the early 1890s Arseny, together with his friend, the architect Viktor Mazyrin, traveled to Spain and Portugal, where both were struck by the Pena Palace in Sintra, which combined medieval Moorish motifs with the national Portuguese Manueline style. On returning to Moscow, Morozov decided to build a castle-like house in a similar spirit, and by 1899 a building had risen on the plot given to him by his mother, one that astonished his contemporaries with its exoticism.

Mazyrin emphasized the Neo-Moorish flavor in the design of the main portal: the horseshoe-shaped opening is framed by twisted columns, and the towers on either side are decorated with shell-shaped stucco reliefs recalling the ornament of the “House of Shells” in Salamanca. The asymmetrical composition and the absence of a single unified style are characteristic of Art Nouveau devices, although certain façade details, such as the columns by the windows, are executed in a classicist spirit. The interior decoration was eclectic: the formal dining room was designed as a knight’s hall in a pseudo-Gothic spirit, the ballroom drawing room was done in the Empire style, the lady’s boudoir in Baroque forms, and individual rooms in Arabic and Chinese taste.

Even before it was finished, the construction of the mansion provoked mocking gossip in Moscow society, and Morozov’s undertaking was reflected in Leo Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection, where a character reflects on the building of an unnecessary palace for an unnecessary man. Arseny Morozov himself lived in the house only briefly: in 1908 he died at the age of 35 of blood poisoning after shooting himself in the leg during an argument. After the revolution the building was occupied by anarchists, and then by the Proletkult troupe, where Sergei Yesenin and the director Sergei Eisenstein worked. Later the mansion housed the embassies of Japan, Great Britain, and India, and from 1959 it became the House of Friendship of Peoples.

In the early 2000s the building underwent restoration commissioned by the Presidential Property Management Department, recreating lost interior details. Since January 2006 it has officially housed the government Reception House, where delegations meet and international conferences are held. A memorial plaque honoring the architect Mazyrin appeared on the façade in 1995.

The Arseny Morozov Mansion remains a rare example, for the Russian capital, of Neo-Moorish exoticism within the context of Moscow Art Nouveau of the late nineteenth century. The building has outlived changing eras, functions, and owners, but has preserved the appearance envisioned by Mazyrin and Morozov, and continues to surprise passers-by on Vozdvizhenka with its combination of architectural motifs from the Iberian Peninsula and merchant Moscow.