TSUM

Almost nothing on Khreshchatyk predates 1945. The street was mined and detonated in September 1941, then burned for the better part of two weeks, and what stands there today is a post-war rebuild. The white block holding the corner of vul. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho is one of the exceptions — the Central Department Store opened on 1 May 1939, and it is still trading.

TSUM, as everyone calls it, spent four years hollowed out and reopened in December 2016 as Kyiv's luxury department store: eight floors, a beauty hall, a cinema and a planted terrace over the city's main avenue. Walking in costs nothing, which matters here. Plenty of people come for the third floor and the view, not the price tags.

The building that outlived the street

The 1939 store had seven floors, marble staircases, columns with capitals and a lift most shoppers had never ridden — around 5,570 sq m of selling space, and the nearest thing Kyiv had to a palace of trade. It traded until the occupation, was stripped and burned inside, and came through the destruction of the street around it.

The wing along Khreshchatyk went up in 1955–58, by the architects Ihor Homolyaka and Vadym Zhoha, taking the selling floor to 9,000 sq m; Soviet figures claim 170,000 shoppers on the busiest days. Escalators followed in 1960. Kyiv's metro opened that same November, so for a while the only moving staircases in the city were down there and in here — which is roughly what this shop was built to signify.

A Constructivist plan, an Art Deco building

The corner started as something else entirely. Mykola Kholostenko drew a seven-storey Constructivist block with shops below, briefly earmarked as a House of Books, before official taste turned against modernism and the scheme was redrawn. What went up between 1936 and 1939 is Art Deco — vertical rhythm, hard geometry, ornament on a short leash — credited to Leonid Metsoyan and Danylo Fridman of Alexei Shchusev's Moscow workshop, though attributions differ between sources.

The Khreshchatyk frontage was meant to run twice as long, and the buildings already on the block stopped it; the post-war wing finally finished the job. The facade reads as one continuous design and is nothing of the sort.

Gutted and rebuilt behind its own facade

ESTA Holding bought the store in 2010 and closed it on 1 February 2012. The redevelopment had to keep the 1939 facade exactly where it stood, which became the engineering problem of the project: some 500 tonnes of steel braced the outer wall while everything behind it was demolished and built again. The reported bill ran past $100 million.

Benoy, the British practice, took the architecture and interiors and drove a sculptural free-form void up through the middle of the building; Landor handled the brand; Philippe de Beauvoir, then director of Le Bon Marché in Paris, advised on what a European department store should feel like. It reopened in December 2016 at about 45,000 sq m, 23,500 of that selling space, over eight floors.

Eight floors, and the one to make time for

The layout runs as expected — beauty and perfume, womenswear, menswear, shoes and accessories, sport, children, home — and the floor worth your time is the third. TSUM carries Ukrainian labels at a scale nothing else in the country matches: Frolov, Ksenia Schnaider, Litkovskaya, Ruslan Baginskiy, Anna October, Sleeper, Guzema. One room, and a fair account of where Ukrainian fashion currently stands.

The seventh floor is the other reason to ride up. Milk Bar takes about 600 sq m and 260 covers, with a terrace looking down Khreshchatyk, and shares the level with a five-screen Multiplex. Come late in the afternoon — the light runs up the avenue from the west, and the terrace is the easiest place to be standing when it does.

Getting there, and what's next door

The address is Khreshchatyk 38/2, at vul. Bohdana Khmelnytskoho, in Shevchenkivskyi district. Metro Khreshchatyk on the red line surfaces at the door, and Maidan Nezalezhnosti on the blue line links to it underground. There is parking beneath the building, but the metro sets you down closer than any space you will find.

Five minutes south is the Bessarabsky Market, under a covered hall of 1912 and open again since December 2025 after a rebuild that dropped a food hall in among the old stalls. Ten minutes north is Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and past it Sofiivska and Mykhailivska squares and the Golden Gate. One practical note: during an air-raid alert, large shops in central Kyiv close and staff move everyone to the shelter, so keep some slack in the day.