Why are so many of St Petersburg's renowned art-nouveau mansions being left to rot?

The city's impressive houses were built for the aristocrats and millionaires of their day.
peter nasmyth unwraps Exhibit A with elaborate care: a Russian book entitled Deshevia Pastroiki: Dachnaya Arkhitektura – Cheap Buildings: Dacha Architecture. Its pages are falling out, visibly eaten away by time. He'd found it 15 years ago in a second-hand bookshop in sub-tropical Sukhumi – once the Black Sea's smartest resort, latterly the war-torn capital of Georgia's breakaway state of Abkhazia – and it had cost him a dollar. Then he tells me what he's done with it: made a smart new English edition in facsimile – with the more explanatory title, The Art Nouveau Dacha: Designs by Vladimir Story, Published 1917 St Petersburg – and an accompanying exhibition of his own photographs.


"I just loved the drawings in the book," says Nasmyth. "I loved the fact they showed you how to build your own art-nouveau house. And the book was simply going to disappear. I showed it to my friends, who all thought it was great." For the next decade it sat on the shelf, but an idea was germinating. Nasmyth runs his own English café-bookshop in Tbilisi, and had become exercised by the fact that some of the city's loveliest art-nouveau buildings were going to rack and ruin: might the book be used to raise awareness of what was being lost? He investigated the possibility of its re-issue by some Russian publishers, but they didn't see the point. "So I thought, OK, I've got to save this book, so I'll republish it myself." It was safely out of copyright.

One of Nasmyth's architect friends, who had studied at Prince Charles's academy, said that she thought the Prince would love it, so Nasmyth sent it to him. At the same time, another friend suggested he send it to a leading modernist architect, so he did that too. The modernist loved it, and immediately offered to write a foreword. Meanwhile, news had come back that Prince Charles also wanted to write a foreword. This presented an unexpected quandary, as the modernist regarded the Prince as being – architecturally speaking – the root of all evil. The modernist crossly bowed out, leaving Charles to write the foreword.