




Studio
Living room
Hallway © All photos by Igor Palmin
The photographs were made by Igor Palmin, while Victor Melnikov, the architect’s son, was alive. Viktor Melnikov is also the author of the majority of paintings and drawings that are in the house. Without a doubt, the Chayka hoover (issued since 1963) was his purchase as well.
Konstantin Melnikov brought this carpet from Paris in 1925.
All 20th-century architects built homes for themselves, all except Soviet architects, in whose country stand-alone residences ran against the powerful Socialist tide. How Melnikov managed to evade these constraints is a mystery and our good fortune that providence happened to smile on this wildest of all the dreamers of the Soviet avant-garde. The home is made up of two cylinders with honeycombed walls and a single bedroom for the entire family. The house is an architectural masterpiece, is celebrated worldwide and is one of the top attractions for foreign tourists to Moscow. But, for Russians, it is important not so much as an architectural wonder but as a cultural anomaly: a single-family home built during the era of the accursed “apartment question” with the inscription, “Konstantin Melnikov architect”, proudly displayed over the entrance and with an enormous, bright, cathedral-like studio on the third floor, all of it bespeaking Melnikov’s pride in a profession little recognized in the USSR, whose members were treated as anonymous functionaries of design institutes and slaves of the building industry.

Living room © All photos by Igor Palmin





















