Four front doors, and no two windows the same shape. That is where you start with ‘Julietka’ — the villa Julian Zachariewicz built for himself in 1891–1893, the one house where the architect answered to nobody but himself. It stands on a wooded rise in Kastelivka, on the western edge of Lviv, and from the street it reads less like a townhouse than a small red-brick castle: turrets, weathervanes, steep gables and windows scattered across the walls in no obvious order.
The name is the first tell — not a grand estate but a tender diminutive, the kind you give a home you're fond of. Zachariewicz was one of the busiest architects in the city and twice rector of its Polytechnic; here, for once, he was his own client. That is the pleasure of the place. You can read the man's taste straight off his own walls.
Zachariewicz did not simply build a house in Kastelivka — he helped invent the place. Through the 1880s he and the architect Ivan Levynskyi laid the district out as Lviv's first ‘garden city’: a green quarter of some sixty stand-alone villas among gardens, planned as a deliberate escape from the tenement blocks downtown. His own villa was among the first to go up, designed with his son Alfred — a rising architect in his own right — and the family lived here until September 1939.
Building for the household rather than a buyer turned the villa into a standing experiment. He threw out symmetry and the obedient rectangle and let the plan sprawl into something close to a maze, every part following its own logic. It is a rare chance to watch an architect think with nobody looking over his shoulder.
The style resists a single label — romantic late historicism sliding into the first notes of Secession, with a neo-Gothic hint in the steep gables. What ties it together is the red, unrendered brick, the very material William Morris and his circle had turned into a creed in England. By one account the villa takes its cue straight from the Red House outside London, the founding building of the Arts and Crafts movement; the resemblance, and the thinking behind it, suit the house.
That thinking was total control, and Zachariewicz followed it to the letter. He gave the villa four separate entrances and set windows of every shape and size into the walls, no two alike. Indoors the rooms wander like a puzzle. Much of the original woodwork survives — the winding staircase, carved cabinets, built-in furniture — along with the stained glass. Tradition holds that Zachariewicz painted the glass panels himself and had the tiled stoves glazed to match their colours, room by room. Whether or not every touch is his, the intent is plain: the whole villa was meant to be read as one work.
One detail rewards a hunt. On an outer wall Zachariewicz set a sundial — reckoned to be the only one left in Lviv from Austro-Hungarian times. It still works. On a bright day the shadow falls where it should, marking the hours exactly as it did for the family who once checked the time against it on their way out the door. Find it, and the century between then and now closes up for a moment. It is the kind of small, human touch a house built to order almost never gets.
The twentieth century treated it roughly. After the Second World War the villa was turned into a kindergarten, which cost it both its status and, across decades of neglect, much of its condition. For a long stretch nobody much cared for it.
The rescue came recently, and from an unlikely direction: an IT company took the building for offices — drawn by the very strangeness that made it impractical — and set about restoring what had lasted. Sources give different dates for the particulars, so it is safest to speak in general terms; the essential point is that the villa was pulled back from ruin, and much of its original fabric came through with it.
The villa stands at vul. Metrolohichna 14a, deep in Kastelivka on the western side of the city and well off the tourist trail. That is part of the reward: the streets around it hide other villas from the same turn-of-the-century building boom, and the district repays an unhurried wander.
One caveat. The house is in private use, so there is normally no way inside — and the point is to see it from the street in any case, without disturbing whoever works behind those four doors. Fold it into a walk through Kastelivka and Zachariewicz's brick castle turns into the find of the afternoon: the sort of place you come upon by chance and can't quite believe isn't on every itinerary.
Будинок № 1а вирізняється шпильчастою вежею та був зведений у 1903-1904 роках у неоготичному стилі. Його спроєктував архітектор Ґраціан Яворський для Яна Дилевського, а будівництвом займалася фірма Альфреда Захаревича і Юзефа Сосновського. Під час робіт також застосовували залізобетонні системи французького інженера Франсуа Еннебіка.
