ARCHITECTURE
wooden architecture — research, maintenance and restoration

It is a wooden one-storey house with ‘svetelka’ (an attic room) placed on a high basement. According to its structural layout, the house is a an example of the so-called ‘glagol’ type (or L-type); it consists of living and household quarters of the same height but of different size. Both quarters are covered by a common gable roof, which is symmetrical above the living quarters and asymmetrical (with different slopes angles) above the storage area.

From the south, the house is adjoined by the porch, a rectangle platform which rests on four pillars and has one flight of stairs. The single slope of the roof covering the porch is supported by the pillars. The dwelling part of the house, which is a five-wall framework with a longitudinal inner wall, consists of ‘izba’ (the living room itself) and ‘gornitsa’ (the guest room). Through the ‘seni’ (antechamber), where the main entrance door opens, these two rooms are connected with two unheated rooms located along the southern facade. In the northern half of the house there is a shed. One flight of stairs leads down to the basement where there is a cattle-shed and a storage area. The log frameworks of the cattle-sheds in the western part of the house are an autonomous section, not linked with the main part, and the shed rests on thick pillars (massive logs). In the basement under the living room (‘izba’) and the guest room (‘gornitsa’) there are two storage rooms. The door to the basement and the sloping ramp leading into the shed are on the front facade. The side facades have gateways; and there is an attic room above the living quarters, where a set of stairs leads.

The framework is made up of logs fixed according to the traditional method with the logs’ ends protruding from the edges of the walls in the corners (‘v oblo’); the roof is fixed with the logs making up the pediments and the poles that bear roof timber. The log walls are not covered with boards. The windows of the dwelling rooms have frames of the profiled boards and the windows of ‘izba’ and ‘svetelka’ are embellished with richly decorated frames. They have paneled shutters on each side, rectangular top part with a laid-on decorative plaque on it and the volute-shaped bottom part with a stylized figure in the middle. The lower part of the frame has a shape of a semi-oval with the decorative plaque between the side parts, which ends are decorated with ‘drop-like’ carvings.

The inner surface of the walls in the dwelling part is smoothly hewed; the ceilings are flat and fixed to the beams; the living quarters are heated with Russian stoves with sleeping benches, which face the front facade. The strip foundation is made of rubble concrete. The front facade is asymmetrically divided by the longitudinal inner wall into 3 windows of ‘izba’ which are decorated with window cases, and a double window of the sitting room. The two windows of the attic room and the protruding ends of the logs supporting decorative balcony are also located on this facade.

The facial boards of the roof over the living quarters are decorated with multi-tier carvings made as geometrically-shaped hollows. The lower line displays the alternation of contoured semicircles with round holes in the middle; and the upper line carving has a step-like contour. The vertical board covering the joint of two fascia board along the slopes of the roof (‘towel’) is decorated with two carved rosettes, separated by round holes, and drop-like carvings at the end. The facial boards over the household quarters are smoothly hewed, and their ends are rounded.