The Buturlina Mansion

On Tchaikovsky Street, not far from the Kelch Mansion, stands another monument of private 19th-century architecture — the Buturlina House, a three-storey Neo-Baroque palace that closes the vista of Mokhovaya Street. The building is considered one of its architect's most successful works and remains a residential building to this day.

In the early 18th century the plot belonged to bombardier Vasily Korchmin, and until the late 1840s a modest wooden house stood on it. The land was acquired by Elizaveta Buturlina, a lady of the imperial court and wife of Dmitry Buturlin, who commissioned architect Harald Bosse to design a palace in the spirit of mid-18th-century St Petersburg residences. Construction took place in 1857–1860, but the client did not live to see it completed — she died in 1859.

The central part of the façade is designed as a three-bay recessed avant-corps with a segmental pediment, flanked by two further projecting avant-corps; between them, at second-floor level, is an open terrace with an ornate five-section railing. The building was originally crowned by a faceted dome, which has not survived, nor has the owner's coat of arms above the arch, the decorative vases, or part of the sculptural ornamentation. The upper storey is decorated with pilasters and three-quarter columns, while more modest residential wings surround the two inner courtyards.

In the late 19th century the building was purchased by the Austro-Hungarian embassy, which occupied it from 1899 to 1914 — it left the mansion after a pogrom and arson attack at the start of the First World War. In 1897 the interiors were partially redesigned by architects Boke and Pio, largely preserving Bosse's original décor; a small Catholic chapel with an image of the Madonna and Child was consecrated on the second floor of the courtyard wing. After the revolution, the building briefly housed a self-governing body of former prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army, and in the 1920s the mansion was converted into a communal apartment building. Yevgeny Lagutkin, head of Leningrad's local air-defence service, lived here from 1938 to 1983, and during the Siege a bomb destroyed the front wing, which was later restored.

In 2022–2023 the façades were restored, returning the building to its historic beige-ochre colour in place of the turquoise-green used after the war — the tone was confirmed from the architect's watercolour and samples of the old plaster. At the same time, the railings were recreated from surviving images, including the central terrace section bearing the monogram of the house's original owner.

The Buturlina House remains a striking example of mid-19th-century palace architecture within the residential fabric of the Liteiny district — a monument that has survived changes of ownership, a diplomatic mission and Soviet-era rebuilding, yet has preserved the foundations of the décor conceived a century and a half ago.