The architect who helped bring reinforced concrete to Lviv built himself a mock-medieval castle in stone. Józef Sosnowski worked the new material into the Opera and the main railway station — then, around 1901, he raised something firmly medieval for his own family on vul. Generala Chuprynky: two adjoining houses, numbers 50 and 52, with crenellated rooflines, a corner tower and a stone lion crouched by the gate. From the pavement it could pass for a fragment of some Italian hill town.
This is the Sosnowski Palace, though “palace” flatters it — no magnate ever lived here, only the man who drew it. It sits in Kastelivka, a leafy villa district that locals still rate among the prettiest corners of the city. More than 120 years on, the illusion holds: pointed windows, a tower, heraldry over the door. A private daydream in stone rather than a set piece for tourists.
Józef Sosnowski (1865–1940) belonged to the generation that gave Lviv its late-imperial face — the decades of historicism and early Art Nouveau. His day job pointed the other way. Trained at the Lviv Polytechnic, he worked in reinforced concrete while it was still a novelty, and in 1903 co-founded the region’s first firm dedicated to it. That concrete went into the Opera and the main railway station. Then he came home and built in stone, battlements and all.
Kastelivka suited the mood. Laid out as a planned villa colony on the western edge of town, it filled with elaborate houses in every register from neo-Gothic to early modern; by 1908 the Polish press was ranking it among Lviv’s better addresses. Sosnowski built here not to sell or let but to live in, which is why the house reads as one man’s taste rather than a developer’s template.
The palace is really two buildings, shoulder to shoulder, each with its own entrance and staircase. Number 50, facing the street, went up around 1901. Number 52 — the one with the corner tower that anchors the whole composition — followed about six years later, in 1907.
Both are exercises in historicism: neo-Gothic points and tracery over a heavier neo-Romanesque frame, the mix that gives the complex its toy-fortress look. The pointed windows, the carved detail and above all the tower push it past “grand tenement” toward something closer to a Venetian palazzo — which is more or less how Sosnowski’s own house is described in the records. It is romantic architecture at play: a modern engineer dressing up in the Middle Ages.
Come close, because the details reward it. Two columns once flanked the main portal, each crowned with a sculpted eagle. The eagles are long gone, but they gave the house the name it still answers to in local lore — Dom Pod Orłami, the House Under the Eagles. A stone lion keeps the older watch: it sits to the right of the gate in a pocket garden, guarding a door that stopped being its master’s a century ago.
Above the entrance to number 50 are two coats of arms. One is Nałęcz, Sosnowski’s own; the other is Łada, thought to be his wife’s — together, a family signature carved into the façade. Look up at the balcony, too, the building’s most admired flourish, where fragments of the original decorative painting still cling to the vault and entryway.
In 1919 Sosnowski sold number 50 to Franciszek Biesiadecki, a collector and bibliophile who is said to have gathered a book-lovers’ circle beneath its roof — which is why you’ll also find the place called the Biesiadecki House. Number 52 passed through other hands, among them Wincenty Waligóra, a director of the Karpaty petroleum concern: the sort of oil-money owner the Lviv of that era threw up. The finer history of individual flats is hard to trace, and best left there.
What’s clear is that the building never turned into a museum. It is still lived in, still private, and prized more by students of Lviv’s architecture than by the tour-bus crowd.
The address is vul. Generala Chuprynky 50/52, an easy walk west of the centre or a short hop on public transport. It is a private, occupied building, so the visit is an exterior one — façades, tower, lion and gate — and it’s poor form to step onto the property or ring at any door. See it on foot, folded into a wander through Kastelivka’s villas, where the House Under the Eagles is the standout: proof that Lviv keeps some of its best surprises a few streets off the tourist map.
Враження справляє дуже сильне. Будівля цікава, збереглася добре, а її розташування таке, що фото виходять справді красивими. Зараз це житловий будинок, тож усередину не пускають, але у двір зайти можна. Окремо варто придивитися до розпису стелі балконів. Знак підкови та хреста є частиною герба Любич, а знак пов’язки - частиною гербів Моравські та Наленч.
Надзвичайно гарна будівля. Щойно дізнався про існування цього маєтку, одразу захотів тут побувати, і нарешті це вдалося. Тепер це житловий будинок, поділений на кілька квартир, хоча спочатку його зводили для родини Сосновських. Споруда має дві частини та окремі входи, виглядає дуже колоритно й збереглася в чудовому стані. Раджу завітати.
Дуже гарне місце з вражаючою архітектурою. Палац підкорює своєю величчю та витонченістю, а прогулянка його територією дарує лише приємні емоції. Особливо сподобалося, що тут збережено історичний дух будівлі, завдяки чому легко відчути атмосферу минулого століття. Це чудовий варіант і для фото, і для культурного відпочинку. Хотілося б приїхати сюди ще раз!
