HISTORICAL BUILDINGS

1896, 1905

The residential house is located on Abovyan Street.

Construction of the building began in 1896. The land plot covered 225 square sazhen (an old Russian unit of length equal to 2.134 m). In 1905, two new wings were added to the building from the sides of Tarkhanovskaya and Sadovaya Streets (later Lalayants Street, now Hin Yerevantsi Street). On the ground floor was located Egor Khanzadyan’s famous “Saxonian” textile and haberdashery store, which had been operating since 1877.

In 1923, the house was nationalized.

The two-story building consists of four rooms and includes a basement. The rooms are arranged according to double-row and single-row layouts. Their floor areas are 36.2 sq m and 28.0 sq m, while the ceiling height is 3.7 m. One of the building’s notable features is that most of its rooms face the streets, a rare characteristic in perimeter-type urban development. The main entrance hall, containing the vestibules and staircase, opens onto Abovyan Street and is also connected to the courtyard. Another entrance is located on the side of Pushkin Street.

The courtyard façades are articulated with galleries up to 2.6 m wide. Three projecting balconies (2.6 × 1.2 m) face the street. The street façades are finished with rusticated stone laid in horizontal bands.

The artistic composition is dominated by horizontal divisions formed by a three-tier plinth, inter-floor stringcourses, the second-floor window-sill wall with niches, and a crowning cornice decorated with a row of dentils. The main southeastern entrance is accentuated by vertical wall articulation, semicircular arched openings of the entrance and the window above it, and a raised triangular pediment intersected by a horizontal stringcourse and decorated with rusticated stonework. A similar pediment crowns the large arched window on the southwestern façade.

The remaining openings are rectangular, while the central vertical elements of the window frames are adorned with scroll-shaped capitals. The projecting balconies feature decorative metal lattice railings.

The building has load-bearing walls. The façades facing the streets are built of finely dressed tuff stone, while the remaining walls are constructed of roughly finished stone. The courtyard façades are plastered. The ceilings are flat and wooden. The roof is pitched and covered with sheet metal. The vestibule floors are paved with ceramic tiles. The courtyard balconies are made of wood.

Prominent Soviet Armenian state and party officials, including A. Shahsuvaryan and F. Vardanyan, lived in this house. During the 1940s, the second floor housed the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Executive Committee of the Armenian SSR. Several scenes of the film The Orchestra Boys (1960) were filmed here.