Kyiv Art Nouveau: irises, masks and chimaeras

Kyiv · from the 1890s to 1914

Kyiv Art Nouveau is easiest to find by looking up. Over the front door of a house in Lukianivka, slender irises twine their leaves in stucco - "the favourite flowers of the modern style", as the register of Kyiv's monuments calls them. The civil engineer Volodymyr Bezsmertnyi built the house in 1910–1911 for Mykola Hrabar, who chaired the Kyiv district court; it is known as the House with Irises.

In Ukrainian the style is called модерн. The Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine gives its other names: Art Nouveau in France, Jugendstil in Germany, Liberty in Italy, Secession in Poland and Ukraine. It belongs to the turn of the twentieth century, and in Kyiv it arrived with a building boom.

Kyiv was growing fast: 127,251 people in the census of 1874, 247,723 in the census of 1897. The city went through two building booms, in 1895–1899 and 1909–1914, and about 850 income houses - blocks of flats built to let - went up around the turn of the century. Credit made them pay: loans cost 7–8 per cent a year, and a let house earned back 10–12 per cent of its cost. So the decoration was part of the business. A rich facade and a moulded entrance hall had to draw tenants and impress their guests. A 2026 study calls Kyiv's modern mostly a "facade style": the new ornament was laid over the usual plan of an income house.

The ornament has its own vocabulary. The encyclopedia lists curved window and door openings, iron railings, a woman's head with stylised hair, plants and flowers, and new materials: reinforced concrete in the structure, ceramics and majolica on the walls. Kyiv's facades add irises, water lilies, viburnum and chestnut leaves, often on light yellow, green, light blue or grey walls. On Bulvarno-Kudriavska Street, Martyn Klug built a house in 1909–1910 for August Septer, who owned a bakery and a confectioner's: blue majolica sits high on the yellow brick, under a white arched crown. The register counts it among the brightest modern houses in Kyiv.

Faces are everywhere. On Yaroslaviv Val, two caryatids with long loose hair stand by the door of No. 14-A, built in 1910–1911 for Leonid Rodzianko, an owner of stud farms; above them, over the oval stairwell window, is a woman's head with flowers in her hair. On No. 14-B next door, bearded men open their mouths under the cornice. On Shota Rustaveli Street, an income house of 1902–1903 at No. 9 has three spired gables, women's and men's masks, and panels of intertwined catfish between the first-floor windows.

Animals too. On Hoholivska Street, owls sit by the door of the House with Cats, built in 1909, and cats with green eyes and red mouths flank its large arched window. Kyivans long credited the house to Horodecki; it was built by Volodymyr Bezsmertnyi, the engineer of the House with Irises. The register places it in the romantic current of late modern, with details taken from Romanesque and Gothic buildings. On Velyka Zhytomyrska Street, two snakes wind around chestnut branches under the bay of No. 32, an income house of 1911–1912, possibly by the architect Ledokhovskyi; Kyivans call it the House with Snakes.

The encyclopedia names three architects of a Kyiv school of modern: Eduard Bradtman, Władysław Horodecki and Oleksandr Verbytskyi. Bradtman, the city architect from 1898, put up Kyiv's first modern building, Petro Krutikov's circus, finished in 1903 and destroyed in 1941. Horodecki and Ledokhovskyi are called the fathers of Kyiv modern. On Olesia Honchara Street, Ledokhovskyi's house and clinic for Dr Kachkovsky, of 1907, has a round window with a balcony and two winged women on the attic. The courtyard arch on a single column and the gate grilles were borrowed, slightly changed, from a building in Paris: Hector Guimard's Castel Béranger. The Ukrainian Small Drama Theatre, founded in 1989, has its address there.

Horodecki built the best-known house of them all for himself. The House with Chimaeras, at 10 Bankova Street, went up in 1901–1903 on the slope of the Klov plateau, so it has three storeys on one side and six on the other. Its sculpture, by the Italian Emilio Sala, was cast in cement, then the newest of materials; on one group Sala scratched "E. Sala. 1902". Heads of elephants, rhinoceroses and antelopes are set into the walls, frogs and sea monsters crowd the roof, lizards climb the columns by the entrance. A legend says Horodecki built it in mourning for a drowned daughter; the city's own guide puts the decoration down to his passion for hunting. The historian V. Yasiievych compared the house only with Gaudí, above all with Casa Milà. Horodecki did not keep it: in 1912 he pledged it against a loan, and in 1913 it was sold at auction.

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  Corner of the House with Chimaeras with sculpted animals on the roof and a stone creature on a plint

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  Granite steps to a wooden door between columns topped with horned animal heads, House with Chimaeras

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  Relief of leaves, curling stems and a round flower beside a wooden door of diagonal boards, Kyiv

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  sculpture, by the Italian Emilio Sala, was cast in cement, then the newest of materials; on one grou

Alongside it grew a Ukrainian architectural modern, also called the Neo-Ukrainian style. Its model became the zemstvo building in Poltava, designed by Vasyl Krychevsky after a competition of 1903. Its Kyiv works include the Serhii Hrushevsky city school, with facades by Krychevsky (1911), and the architect Shekhonin's income house at 8 Pankivska Street (1910). In the USSR modern was branded "nationalist" and "decadent" and passed over in silence; its buildings were rebuilt and destroyed, most of all in the 1970s.

After the Bolsheviks took Kyiv, they nationalised the houses. They took the House with Irises in 1921 and moved an orphanage and a school into it, and Yaroslaviv Val 14 in 1922, making its flats communal. The House with Chimaeras was divided into communal flats as well; after the Second World War the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine took it over and turned it into a polyclinic for the Party elite. Baron Hesselbein's house of 1901–1903, in the quarter Kyivans called "Kyiv Paris", is also known as the Cradle of the Spirit: its facade is read as the myth of the infant Zeus, with the head of his mother Rhea over the entrance arch and, at the very top, an open-mouthed mask of Kronos, who swallowed his children. The house was badly damaged in September 1941 by blasts set by Soviet saboteurs as the Red Army left the city. It was restored in 1948, and the wrong year, 1886, was put on its facade. Paint flakes from the gable, and young trees grow out of the brick around Kronos. In Soviet times a fourth storey was built onto the House with Snakes and its wavy attic was lost; in the House with Cats, repairs in the 1970s did away with the back stairs and whitewashed the paintings on the wall of a room with a bay window.

Most of Kyiv's modern buildings are on the heritage register, but the entries often do not say whether the facade or the whole building is protected, and interiors are lost in repairs. Some houses are not fully listed at all: the house of 1910–1911 at 65 Olesia Honchara Street, with its tiled bays, is registered only as a newly identified monument. The House with Snakes declined after 2010, when a new owner planned a hotel there: plaster and moulding fell, and the rooms went unheated. Its restoration began in 2021, with plans to take off the Soviet storey and remake the attic. The nonprofit True Kyiv restores old doors and transoms; by its count about a hundred authentic doors from before 1917 are left in the city. Its founder, Serhii Myronov, was killed in action in 2022. Russian strikes have reached Horodecki's other buildings too: St Nicholas's church was damaged in December 2024, the National Art Museum in May 2026.

Kyiv's modern would be no less bright than in other European capitals, had it not been for communism and Bolshevism. They did not only destroy or spoil these houses with communal flats and rebuilding; they also took from people the sense of responsibility for the space beyond their own flat, just as they destroyed the culture of memory and of prosperity. In Soviet times the heritage of modern was not officially studied, and censorship forbade writing about it in the Kyiv press. When the flats were privatised from 1992, their owners came to own the stairwells, the roof and the basement as well, and a law of 2015 obliges them to maintain and repair the common parts. Yet in 2015 a World Bank specialist wrote that houses were still managed as if there had been no privatisation, and that owners stayed passive. That is why the last pieces of Kyiv's modern are still disappearing.

Kyiv's modern went up quickly, much of it to let, and what makes it is small: a door, a balcony grille, a woman's head over a window. It is lost one repair at a time, and it can be kept the same way.

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Sources: Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine; Kyiv City Guide, Kyiv City State Administration; Звід пам'яток історії та культури України: Київ, 1999–2011; O. Kozakova and O. Hershuni et al., KNUBA, 2026; L. Hnatiuk and M. Bovkun, 2012; Commons, 2017; ZN.UA, 2019; Wikipedia: "House with Chimaeras", "Прибуткові будинки Києва", "Ярославів Вал, 14", "Будинок з ірисами", "Будинок барона Гессельбейна", "Прибутковий будинок Септера", "Будинок із котами", "Будинок зі зміями та каштанами"; Misto Kyiva, Secret Land; Rubryka, 2025; Radio Svoboda, 2025; Ukrainska Pravda, 2026; Laws of Ukraine No. 2482-XII (1992) and No. 417-VIII (2015); G. Gajda, Yevropeiska Pravda, 2015. Photographs: MYT'.