The carved oak staircase inside is why this building keeps ending up on camera. It stands free in the hall under a glass roof, with tall mirrors doubling every flight. In the Soviet Union's much-loved 1978 D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, d'Artagnan climbed these stairs to play chess with Cardinal Richelieu, the House of Scientists standing in for the cardinal's Paris palace.
The name is a trap. Nobody built the House of Scientists for science: it went up in 1897–1898 as a private club for the Galician aristocracy — a casino in the old sense — and the scholarly title came only under Soviet rule. Polish and Ukrainian guidebooks routinely call its vestibule the most beautiful secular interior in Lviv.
Casino here meant a members' club, not a gambling hall. In late-19th-century Lviv the word stood for a closed society with a restaurant, reading room, billiards, cards, balls and concerts — gambling was on the menu, not the point. This club grew out of the world of horse studs and racing, which is why the sources give it so many names, from Nobles' Casino to the Landowners'. You got in by recommendation, and the polished oak and the fires in the grates reminded members, nightly, of who they were.
The club ran here until the Second World War. The Soviets reopened the aristocrats' rooms to workers in science and the arts in 1946 and, in 1948, gave the building the name it still carries. It now belongs to the education-and-science trade union and, since 2008, cannot be privatised.
The design came from the busiest architectural office in Central Europe. The Vienna studio of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer specialised in theatres — forty to fifty of them, from Vienna to Zagreb and Cluj. In Ukraine the firm is best known for the Odesa Opera and the theatre in Chernivtsi, and it also gave Lviv the Hotel George. This is not a theatre, but the same instinct shows in the route from door to atrium to halls. The Viennese drew it; local builders Lishkevych and Pszorn put it up. Capital-city polish, Galician hands.
Outside, the building is as restrained as neo-Baroque gets — two storeys closing the end of the street. The centrepiece is a tall arcaded loggia whose balconies rest on the shoulders of atlantes, one turned to face forward, the other back; local historians like to read the turn of a century into that. By a persistent local account the figures aren't carved stone but metal, grown over a form by electroplating. Set into the windows above are the coats of arms of Volhynia, Podillia, Rus, the Belz land and the Commonwealth — a plain statement of where the members' estates lay. The sculpture is by Theodor Friedl and Reinhold Völkel, after models by Rudolf Weyr.
The value of the place is all indoors, and most of it survives. The carved woodwork of the vestibule and staircase was designed by the Hungarian sculptor Sándor von Járay. Beyond it comes everything a Galician gentlemen's club was meant to have: panelled walls, stucco, crystal chandeliers, parquet, silk on the walls and fireplaces, including a rare alabaster one in a city that usually worked in marble and sandstone. The over-door paintings are by Lviv artists Stanisław Dębicki, Stanisław Rejchan, Tadeusz Rybkowski and Michał Sozański. Upstairs, an enfilade of about eight halls runs from a two-hundred-seat grand salon to smaller rooms known by colour, with a gilded little balcony for musicians tucked to one side.
For all its historic dressing, this was among the first buildings in Lviv wired for electricity — though the public so mistrusted the new current that the fittings were disguised as gas jets. A house that quoted Baroque outside was one of the most modern in the city within.
The cinema link is no one-off. In 1978 Georgiy Yungvald-Khilkevich brought his Odesa Film Studio crew here for the three-part D'Artagnan and the Three Musketeers, with Lviv doubling for Paris and the House of Scientists cast as Richelieu's residence — Milady sweeping down the oak stairs, d'Artagnan climbing them to the chessboard. The interiors are still rented for shoots; in 2021 the staircase illustrated a Bloomberg feature. Not that everything is original: a fire broke out on 14 September 1953, traced to faulty wiring, and what you see today owes as much to a long restoration — from the 1980s into the early 2000s — as to luck.
The address is vul. Lystopadovoho Chynu 6, in the Halytskyi district — about fifteen minutes on foot from Ploshcha Rynok along vul. Kopernyka, past the Potocki Palace. This is a working institution, not a museum: conferences, concerts, choirs and a steady traffic of weddings and photo shoots. Whether you can walk in depends on what's booked that day — during an event or a film shoot the doors stay shut. Hour-long guided tours of the old casino do run, but times and prices shift, so check directly before you go.
Дуже приємне місце з власною історією. Колись, до 1939 року, тут було Національне казино. Зараз у цьому просторі влаштовують бали та фотосесії. Вхід для дорослих коштує 100 грн. Якщо хочете зробити красиві фото, сюди точно варто завітати. А для професійної фотосесії оплата окрема і потрібна попередня домовленість.
Дуже гарне місце для фото, хоча дістатися туди непросто, а ще складніше опинитися там без натовпу туристів. Нам пощастило потрапити на екскурсію з гідом, який детально розповів про цей заклад. Раджу і вам завітати до цього елегантного будинку!
Дуже приємні інтер’єри, а вхід коштує лише 50 грн. Залів небагато, але загалом тут красиво :)
