A house with a story

Alpina Aparthotel is located in the former tenement house of the Gagarin princes at 19 Kuznetsky Most. The building is a listed heritage site with almost three centuries of history.

Boyar chambers

The site is first mentioned in 1742, when the stone chambers of the noble Velyaminov-Zernov family stood here; fragments of them survive inside the current building. At that time Kuznetsky Most was still a real bridge over the Neglinnaya River.

The Gagarin estate

In the 19th century the estate passed to the Gagarin princes. Its owner was Grigory Gagarin, a painter, a pupil of Karl Bryullov and a friend of the poet Lermontov, with whom he sketched in the Caucasus. Later the house was inherited by his son Andrei Gagarin, an engineer and the first director of the St Petersburg Polytechnic Institute.

Moscow’s most fashionable street

Kuznetsky Most was the city’s main shopping street, and the house lived by trade. In 1843 the Russian Goods Shop of the Society of Russian Manufacturers opened in the main house, while the wing housed book and music shops and photo studios. In the 1880s a branch of the famous Muir & Mirrielees store opened here, the company that later built TsUM.

Roman Klein’s facade

In 1885–1887 the estate was rebuilt by architect V. A. Kossov, and in the late 1890s Roman Klein, the architect of TsUM and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, joined the buildings into one four-storey house and created the facade you see today. Look up: sea griffins, a ship’s prow and a caduceus with an anchor are symbols of trade and of Mercury, patron of merchants.

The 20th century

After the revolution the house was home to editorial offices and publishers, among them Zemlya i Fabrika, which published the magazine Vokrug Sveta (Around the World). After the war the ground floor became Gastronom No. 41, a grocery store, and the upper floors were turned into flats.

Today

In 2021–2022 the building was fully renovated: new utilities, roof and windows, and the facade decoration was restored. Today you can stay in a historic house with every modern comfort, a few minutes from Lubyanka and the Bolshoi Theatre.