Chelyshev House (1899)

Brief Information

On the site of a former prison, one of Samara’s first apartment buildings with flats built specifically for rent appeared in 1899. The merchant Dmitry Chelyshev commissioned the architect Alexander Shcherbachev to design not a mansion for one family, but a large income-generating apartment house: until 1910, it was considered the largest permanent building in Samara. This contrast is important for looking at the building: behind the decorative “Russian” facade stands a new urban function — housing as a regular source of city income.

After the revolution, the apartments became communal flats, while the house itself remained a residential apartment building. It should therefore be seen not as a frozen museum facade, but as an old urban shell in which ways of life changed. Its federal protected status emphasizes the value of precisely this shell: the house has largely preserved its original appearance, although some of its crowning elements have been lost.

What to Notice First

The main principle for viewing it is that brick serves both as structure and as decoration. It is worth noting that the house’s pseudo-Russian style is not made from applied ornament: brick was used not only for the walls, but also for the facade decoration. On Krasnoarmeyskaya Street, the facade is arranged symmetrically, and its upper part was once accentuated by tent-roofed turrets; however, the tented domes in the central section and the corner turret have been lost, so the silhouette has not survived in full.

The first floor is separated from the upper floors by a cornice band, which helps the building read horizontally. Above it begins a richer decorative treatment: the windows of the second and third floors are framed by openwork surrounds in the form of kokoshniks. Their supports differ by floor: on the second floor, pitcher-shaped columns are specified; on the third, columns with balusters. These differences show that the facade was conceived not as a single flat wall, but as a sequence of levels with different rhythms.