This Art Nouveau building at Chornoglazivska Street, 14 is notable not only for its façade but also for its entrance.
When you step inside, you get the feeling that the building was designed for giants—the staircase is so wide that three people could easily walk side by side on it.
The house was built in 1915 according to a design by Oleksandr Rzhepishevskyi.
According to the 1909 list of property owners, this courtyard property belonged to Ottilie Konstantinovna Helfferich, the widow of Albert Helfferich, a citizen of Württemberg, who was the brother of the well-known industrialist Maximilian Helfferich.
The building itself was constructed as an apartment building commissioned by Max Helfferich, the son of Albert Helfferich.
Unfortunately, like many buildings in Kharkiv, this one is also marred by a massive “tsar’s balcony”, that was added in the 1990s.
This house, built in the “Northern Art Nouveau” style typical for Rzhepishevskyi, bears strong traces of German Romanticism, evidently at the client’s request.
It is worth noting that the building was not constructed from scratch, according to the researcher A. Paramonov, it incorporated an older two-story house that had belonged to Ivan Shchelkov, the rector of Kharkiv University, who had previously owned the property.
Max Helfferich was known among his contemporaries for his “lavish” lifestyle—he owned several cars, complete with a chauffeur and a mechanic—but the construction of an apartment building threw him off track financially; there were not enough tenants willing to pay high rents during the protracted years of World War I.
Original doors.
Originally, the house had a tile roof.
As early as 1916, Max Gelferich sold the building to A. Geronimus. Gelferich spent his final years in Pyatigorsk, where he served as deputy chairman of the regional executive committee and was executed by firing squad in 1937.
On July 23, 2022, the building’s facade was damaged as a result of Russian shelling, and the building’s windows were shattered. The building sustained additional damage as a result of rocket attacks on the O. Beketov Kharkiv National University of Architecture and Construction on February 5, 2023.
