"Vampire's Nest" or the embodiment of a childhood dream: a virtual excursion to the 15-room apartment of the famous artist

2023 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-26 05:58

Recently Russian artist Nikas Safronov for his 60th birthday he made himself a gift worth $ 70 million. This is how much the 15-room apartment with all its contents, located in the very center of Moscow, with a stunning panoramic view of the Kremlin, was estimated at. This event caused a huge resonance among the general public in Moscow: the scandalous fame literally follows Nikas on his heels.

Russian blogger Rustem Adagamov on Twitter, comparing Safronov's apartment with a "vampire nest", said that the artist "amazed users of social networks with the tasteless interior of his apartment." So, let's take a look at Nikasa for a visit.

The six-storey building, built in the constructivist style in 1928, is considered a monument of history and culture. It took about 11 years to put everything together: buying up apartments in the house, purchasing antique furniture, antiques. The repair work itself lasted about 5 years. The one-hectare apartment allowed the artist's fantasies to roam freely. This exclusive housing looks like a three-level 15-room apartment with a living area of up to a thousand square meters, and is included in the rating of the "Best Apartments in the World".

While still a schoolboy, Nikas painted textbooks, desks, notebooks with images of Gothic castles. And the educational tasks for the drawing program almost always turned into images of various castles, for which the teacher, in spite of everything, put "fives" - the drawings were very good. Passion for Gothic has good reason, since the artist's ancestors in the 16th century were monks who came to Russia to convert it to Catholicism, but by the will of fate they themselves had to convert to the Orthodox faith. Since then, all the ancestors of Nikas have been clergy, including his grandfather, who was repressed by the Soviet regime. The artist himself says about his religion:"

The passion for Gothic from early childhood grew into the idea of creating your own unusual castle. Later, in his younger years, traveling through the Baltic countries, Western Europe, he sketched various palace interiors, not forgetting about his childhood dream.

In his apartment, Nikas tried to combine two styles - the palace Gothic of the Middle Ages and the modern high-tech. The first floor fully reflects the Gothic style of the Middle Ages. Throughout his life, the artist collected unique furniture, decor elements, antique antiques in Western Europe.

One of the largest rooms in the house of the "holy of holies" is a library, in the cupboards of which a huge number of books in Old Church Slavonic and other European languages are collected. Moreover, each copy has its own history as, indeed, the bookcases themselves, purchased at auctions and brought from England, France, Italy.

At the second level, the design style is not very different from the first: the same massive wooden furniture, with carved decor, a predominance of antiques, ceilings painted by the artist himself, as well as reproductions of paintings by artists of the 15th century. The general atmosphere is emphasized by stained glass windows made in ancient technique and copies wall frescoes by Raphael.

The third floor is designed in high-tech style, in which simplicity and severity, oddly enough, do not contradict the classic Gothic style of the lower floors. The walls are decorated with stone, and the space is divided by panels of onyx glowing at night. Although after the "luxury and wealth" of the lower floors it is a little strange to see it, but in this way the artist decided to pay tribute to the traditions of constructivism, in which the house was erected.

You can walk around the artist's apartment, which has combined the past with the present, as if it were a museum - for months, and each time you find something new in its interior. And you can move from the "Middle Ages" to "our days" by an elevator, which serves as a time machine.

And now, having crossed the sixtieth birthday, when the childhood dream came true, Nikas is full of new ideas:

By the way, for the 60th anniversary from Italy flew longtime Muse of the artist - Sophia Loren, to which Nikas Safronov dedicated many of his works, and she stayed for a visit in the artist's new apartment.