St Petersburg in the context of Art Nouveau

Itinerary

Indulge your passion for Art Nouveau style on this 4 hour tour in Saint-Petersburg. Your guide will explain to you why in St Petersburg this art style, also called Modern Style in Russia, is especially relevant and has so many variations and peculiarities.

During all the tour we will drive you around the city that is often called “the Venice of the North”. First we will take some time in the marvelous Vytebsk train station. Created to serve the needs to travel to the west from Saint-Petersburg. The station is an Art Nouveau pearl of the pre-Soviet capital of Russia.

The whole station was redesigned in 1904 and makes an impression with its decorative reliefs and floral Jugendstil detailing. Inside one finds the opulent Art Nouveau interiors with the stained glass in the foyer as well as sweeping staircases and soaring arches.

While driving around the city center, you’ll admire the Eliseev’s grocery store impressing both outside and inside with its opulent decorations. In this building there is a nice coffee shop and we will have a coffee and cakes if you feel like doing so.

You will discover the House of Books, the tallest building of the city in 1904.

Saint Petersburg has many Art Nouveau mansions and tenant houses. It’s a city on islands and historically lots of Art Nouveau mansions and dachas as well as tenant houses were built away from the city center, on the Islands.

One of them, the Petrograd Island, is truly a museum of Art Nouveau architecture. It was a fashionable and prestigious district of St Petersburg right before the Revolution of 1917. The well-to-do owned the land there and had their mansions made in Art Nouveau, the most popular style of the time.

Among other buildings, in this part of the city you’ll see Kshesinskiy’s mansion, housing the Museum of Political History of Russia nowadays and Lidval House, an Art Nouveau absolute masterpiece.

We’ll make a stop by the elegant Kshesinskiy mansion. Designed in 1904 by the court architect, Aleksandr von Gogen, the building is almost playfully asymmetric, with a single, octagonal tower. Most eye-catching of all are the many contrasting building materials with bands of pink and grey granite, cream-coloured bricks, delicately ornamented iron railings and majolica tiles. We will not go inside the building.