The elegant Art Nouveau house at Poltavskyi Shliakh Street, 57 got its name from the details framing the windows of the third, attic floor – stylized as parrots.

The house was built in 1906 according to the design of Jūlijs Caune for F. V. Alsop, who was engaged in the sale of agricultural machinery and automobiles.

In addition to the traditional Art Nouveau facade decorations in the style of floral ornamentation, it is worth noting some other elegant details of this style that have been preserved – the balcony railing on the second floor and the metal grilles on the ends of the building at the level of the third floor, resembling musical notes.

One can only guess how elegant the entrance group with the round frame of the door, long lost, was once.

Back in 2018, the doors were wooden, although most likely they were already non-original and not as beautiful as the original Art Nouveau doors could have been.

But the most significant loss is the side facade, which previously faced Rubanivskyi Lane. It was distinguished by a beautiful entrance group and a complex rhythm, which was set by the “differently sized” windows and the details framing them, on the third floor. Next to the side facade was a platform for equipment, framed by an Art Nouveau fence. All this was finally lost in 1956 during the construction of a house for the workers of the Chervonyi Zhovten factory, which made Rubanivskyi Lane dead-end and squeezed the “parrot house” into a vice along with its modern neighbor, the Neroslev apartment building (1914, architect Z. Kharmansky).

In the advertising brochure of the trading house of F. Alsop, one can see both complex agricultural machines such as threshers with a mobile steam engine, and simple plows, presses, etc. All images feature Ukrainian peasants in national clothes and landscapes of the Ukrainian village.

The 1913 advertisement states that in the warehouse of F. Alsop’s cars one could also buy the latest models of German Benz cars.

The warehouse of agricultural machinery and tools and the mill-building office of F. V. Alsop also had branches in Poltava, Oleksandrivsk (Zaporizhzhya), Katerynoslav province and Bakhmut. The archives have preserved business correspondence between Alsop’s office and the Ernst Melgose plant – one of the largest manufacturers of agricultural equipment in Kharkiv.