Art Nouveau House (now the western house of the town manor) was built in 1914 by the factory owner Novozhilov. It is the only Art Nouveau building in Plios.
During half a century here in a communal apartment lived the legendary chairman of the city executive committee (mayor) of Plios Evstoliya Kuznetsova, who led the city in 1949-1974.
With restoration of this red-brick mansion with a wooden veranda began Hidden Russia Project - the long-term project of preservation and revival of the historical center of Plios. Members of the British royal family Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, as well as other distinguished guests stayed in the house.
The House of the Seven Windows (the main house of the town manor) looks two centuries older than it really is! The mansion, built at the beginning of the XXI century, embodies the characteristic features of large Plios manor houses of the middle of the XIX century.
A one-storey facade of three windows with a porch and a veranda faces Yurievskaya, and a two-storey front facade with seven high arched windows and a balcony in the upper floor faces the Volga.
The 2.6 metres high windows and the balcony door were transported to Plios from St. Petersburg, from the Palace Embankment.
The reconstruction of the house of traditional Russian architecture was realised within the framework of the Hidden Russia project.
The house with a cross-shaped mezzanine (the eastern house of the city estate) was designed by Ivanovo architect Viktor Shakhmatov and reproduces in its basic features the Shemyakin House, a merchant's mansion that stood here until the 1970s and was demolished for dilapidation.
The House with the Mezzanine allows us to understand how the Levitan House Museum looked like in pre-revolutionary times, the walls of which are now plastered, but you can see in old photographs and paintings that they were brick with stucco decoration.
The reconstruction of a merchant's house with a mezzanine on the Plios embankment was carried out within the framework of the Hidden Russia project.
The Krylov house is a wooden house with a mezzanine built in the 1870s, which appeared in Prokudin-Gorsky's famous colour photograph ‘View of the ancient settlement with the main cathedral’ (1910).
A longitudinal mezzanine, a far-reaching gable with an arched niche, a balcony with an openwork fence, four beam windows of the main facade with carved platbands - these are the decorations of this elegant house, placed on a high terrace of the north-eastern slope of the Sobornaya Gora (Cathedral Hill). A high porch is located in the north-west extension. An open veranda adjoins the house from the south with access to the lilac garden, which is terraced up to the middle of the height of Sobornaya Gora and is famous for its panoramic views of the Volga.
The Krylov House is the top of the ‘Plios five-storey building’ visible only from the water, which consists of three houses climbing one after another up the slope of Sobornaya Gora. At the bottom is the Art Nouveau House, in the middle is the House of the Seven Windows.
The Krylov House was revived by the efforts of the Hidden Russia project in 2004. From the outside, the house still looks exactly as it did in Prokudin-Gorsky's photograph, but inside, the decorators (Natalia and Alexei Shevtsov) have created an interior from scratch that delights everyone who stays here.
Gromov House is an architectural monument, an outbuilding of the town estate of the Moiseevs, major landowners of Plios, built in the first quarter of the 19th century in the style of mature classicism.
Many honoured guests of Plios, including film stars Ralph Fiennes and Vincent Perez, maestro Vladimir Spivakov, philanthropist Boris Teterev stayed in this 200-year-old mansion, which was revived from dilapidation and neglect thanks to the Hidden Russia project.
The house has a small garden stretching along the riverside slope from the embankment to Yurievskaya Street. Next to the house in the garden there is a Himalayan arbour, built by Svetlana Zyryanova in anticipation of the arrival of Queen Sangay Choden, one of the four wives of the fourth king of Bhutan.
The Tolstoy House is located opposite the Levitan House Museum, on the corner of the Volga River embankment and Nikolskaya Street. It once belonged to Afanasy Alekseevich Cherepenin (1899-1970), a captain of the Middle-Volga Shipping Company.
This old log house under a hip roof (four-pitched with a horizontal ridge) was carefully restored and arranged within the framework of the Hidden Russia project in 2007.
Attention is attracted by the openwork gutters made of sifted tin and spectacular platbands in the technique of saw-carving, in the upper part of which stylised dragons guarding the house are hidden (a characteristic Upper Volga pattern). Because of this the Tolstoy House is also known as the Dragon House.
The house has a garden with apple, cherry and currant trees. On one side the garden borders with an old barn.
The long list of famous guests of the house includes Tatiana Tolstaya, Vladimir Mashkov, Danila Kozlovsky, Leonid Desyatnikov, Vyacheslav Zaitsev, Alexei Kudrin.
This is not the whole list of revitalised houses in Plios. More than 50 buildings have been carefully repaired, restored and prepared for modern use in 25 years within the framework of Hidden Russia project .
We regularly replenish the list of houses on the site. Follow the updates!