Kelch Mansion

On Tchaikovsky Street in St Petersburg stands the Kelch Mansion — one of the city's most opulent private buildings from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose eclectic façade conceals a sequence of interiors executed in entirely different historical styles. Today the building houses Russia's Ministry of Justice and the French University College of St Petersburg State University.

Until 1896 the plot was occupied by a modest two-storey house built in 1858–1860, belonging to the Greek consul Ioannis Kondoyannaki. The property was bought for 300,000 roubles by the civil servant Alexander Kelch, using the dowry of his wife, Varvara Petrovna, née Bazanova — granddaughter and heiress to the fortune of the Siberian gold magnate Ivan Bazanov. In 1899 the mansion was registered in Varvara's name. The rebuilding of the house was carried out by the architects Vasily Schöne and Vladimir Chagin, who added a third storey and redesigned the façades; from 1903 Karl Schmidt joined the project, building a Gothic pavilion in the courtyard and completing the interior decoration.

The client asked the architects for a building resembling a medieval castle, without imitating any single style. The street façade was executed in the spirit of the French Renaissance and faced with red and light-grey sandstone; the symmetry of the composition, with its bay windows beneath pediments, is broken only by the right-hand bay window, lost during the war. Inside, each room was decorated in its own distinct manner: a white-marble ceremonial staircase leads to a Gothic dining room with walnut panelling and stained glass from a Riga workshop; the White Hall is done in the Rococo style with stucco mouldings and gilded bronze; and the Pink Drawing Room is adorned with a ceiling painting by the sculptor Maria Dillon. Some of the furniture and a silver dinner service for 32 were commissioned from Fabergé.

In 1904 Varvara Kelch left for Paris, and from 1905 the family's income from their gold mines fell sharply; in 1914, following the couple's divorce, Alexander sold the mansion to the merchant Ivan Alexandrov. After the revolution the house was nationalised: in 1919 the School of Screen Art opened here, later followed by the district committee of the Communist Party of the Dzerzhinsky District. In 1991 the building housed a UNESCO office, and in 1998 the mansion was transferred to St Petersburg State University, where the House of the Jurist opened a year later.

In 2010 the mansion was closed for restoration, and in 2011 it was handed over to the Ministry of Justice. Work to reinforce the foundations and restore the courtyard façades continued from 2016. Today the building combines the functions of a government institution and an academic building, retaining its status as one of the most lavishly decorated monuments of late-19th-century St Petersburg Art Nouveau and Eclecticism.

The Kelch Mansion remains a rare example of private construction in which the client personally determined the building's artistic programme and achieved a standard of decoration approaching that of a museum. Its interiors, executed in a variety of styles by several generations of St Petersburg architects, make it a significant monument in the history of Russian decorative art.