The Art Nouveau style embodied itself most fully in villa architecture. It was the small residential house: the villa or summerhouse, that became the basic theme and fullest embodiment of the ideas of early Art Nouveau. Thanks to the small scale of the building, it was possible to loosen the ossified massing, break away from the canons of academism and shape it in a more modern way. This was also the case in Stanislavov, where the amount of single-family housing naturally increased as one moved away from the strict centre. As early as the turn of the 20th century, the first uniform strings of villa buildings were formed. The group of single-storey villas in Pełesza (Hnatiuka) Street, built in the 1880s and 1890s in the neo-classical style, is well preserved from this period. The romantic trend of the late 19th century is represented by the villas "in the lindens" with their various turrets and asymmetrical risalits, built in Lipova Street, where the area of the Empress Elisabeth City Park (now Shevchenko Park) began. They exemplify the manifestations of the first Art Nouveau features in architectural compositions: namely, the rejection of axiality and symmetry. The basic rectangular projections of the buildings began to acquire various protrusions in the form of protruding porches and additional risalits. The consequence was the disappearance of the straight line of the façade. A clear expression of this tendency is the villa at the end of Lipowa Street (99 Shevchenko Street), which "looks" with its asymmetrical body into the park, built in 1904 and captivates with the fairytale-like romantic composition. Today, unfortunately, it has been so badly deformed that it is impossible to recognise its original silhouette.

An example of a relatively well-preserved transitional form from Historicism to Art Nouveau in the turn-of-the-century building industry in Stanislavl is the villa at 23 Kopernika Street. Its spatial arrangement corresponds to the villa built for Count Franciszek Potulicki (later known as the Villa of Leon Piniński) in Lviv at 4 Matejki Street by Jan T. Kudelski in 1892, so much so that we can consider Jan Kudelski's participation in the design of the Stanislavl villa very likely. The main compositional idea of both buildings was to combine masses of different heights. The combination of a single-storey part and a two-storey mass, topped by a dome, which was the dominant feature of the composition of the Stanislav villa at Kopernika 23, repeats the Lviv prototype on a reduced scale. Trained at the Lviv Polytechnic Institute, architect Jan Tomasz Kudelski (1861-1937) played a great role in the formation of this type of building and the development of the Art Nouveau style in Stanislav architecture. He moved from Lviv to Stanislavov in 1894 and remained an extremely influential architect, creating its peculiar face.

It is interesting that the form borrowed from palaces and suburban villas was adapted - at least in Stanislavov (but also, for example, in Kolomyia) - to house the headquarters of the Sokol Gymnastic Society. This variation in height, which entailed a variety of finials, complicated constructions of broken roofs, enriched with turrets and mansards, was best suited to the needs of the Falconry at the time, built in Stanislavov in 1894 under the direction of Jan Kudelski.


The street most representative of single-family Art Nouveau architecture was Slowackiego (Tarnawskoho) Street, leading from Zablotowska (Vasylyanok) Street towards the railway in the north of the central part of the city. The street was laid out in the 1890s, received its name in May 1899 and was almost entirely built up in the first decade of the 20th century. The result was a condensed cluster of Art Nouveau and eclectic villas. Linearity and planarity, as the most characteristic features of the 'new style', were manifested here in the use of arched curves on the facades and in the decoration. Shallow recesses, with an arched design, covered first one and then several window openings or the entrance. The entrance opening became one of the important points of the Early Renaissance façade, in contrast to the previous era when entrances to buildings were placed at the rear.

The sequence of buildings on Slowackiego Street begins with the picturesque turret of a villa on the corner with Zablotowska Street. The villa was built around 1905 by Adolf Szubert. It is distinguished by the combination of a brick plot with fachwerk elements and wooden window frames and the main entrance, alluding to spa architecture. The picturesque wooden Swiss style boldly entered the arsenal of Art Nouveau decoration. The new art discovered the value of the natural colour of wood its texture and warmth. Not gilded, not hidden under a layer of paint, but in the fullness of their natural beauty, wooden elements became an integral feature of the new style. Following the example of Alpine villas and Carpathian folk architecture, the roofs of detached houses were supported by wooden brackets and embellished with openwork wood carvings.

The house on the other side of Slowackiego Street at No. 4 was built in the early years of the 20th century for the merchant family of David Rubin. Above the entrance gate is a pseudo-Baroque coat of arms with large letters "DR". The baroque character of the façade is enhanced by thick snakes - zoomorphic elements characteristic of Art Nouveau - made in the form of curly vertical stucco sculptures supporting the pediment.

The general tendency of the Art Nouveau style in architecture was to look for ways of diversifying the plan and outer coat of the façade to enhance the artistic effect. For example, the villa of Stanisław Horoszkiewicz of 1904 at 11 Słowackiego Street, which combines a set of blocks into a single spatial composition, has an atypical corner alcove topped with a high helmet, a wooden mansard and a projection beyond the face of the single-storey façade of a risalit crowned with a triangular gable. The variously shaped chimneys gave the villa an additional artistic effect.

The villa at 12 Słowackiego Street was decorated with female mascarons, ribbons and Art Nouveau rings made both in stucco and in metalwork. The mighty residence, with a residential area of around 900 square metres, was built to the order of Zofia Kuźmińska, a wealthy Stanislawian woman. Since Soviet times, the building has been converted into a medical facility. Neglected for decades, it fell into disrepair at the beginning of the 21st century.


At the beginning of the 20th century, the novelty of the form, the predominance of contemporary materials and new constructions were a sign of progress. A sense of humour and refinement that rejected cool humility also reflected the spirit of the era. A favourite detail of Art Nouveau was the various holes in the shape of the large letter "omega". As well as symbolising the end and fulfilment of the world, this shape was reminiscent of a smile, which earned the architecture of this style the nickname "smiling" in some European countries. It is these "smiling" villas in the Art Nouveau aesthetic that create the characteristic image of the single-family streets of Stanislavov. Two villas, joined at their sides, belonged to the merchant Stefański family - Villa Maria and Villa Sofia - built at 14 and 16 Słowackiego St. In the 1940s, the Bolsheviks nationalised them and merged them under one number (No. 16). Later, a kindergarten was opened in the property, which is still in operation today. These villas, as well as the entire even side of Slowackiego street, were covered by an undulating shape of brick fence, which gives it a romantic image balancing between fairy tale and elegance where brick "fortified" towers merge with the open "smile" of the "omega".


The increasingly noticeable trend towards greater plasticity in the façade by replicating the number of soft arches can be seen in the architecture of the circa 1905 area throughout the city. Shapely "omegas" complemented the gables crowning the villa, repeating the hatch outline or, as at 43 Matejki Street, resembling the crest of a sea wave. The villa at 21 Moniuszki Street has a beautiful stepped attic with a semi-circular clearance. Jan T. Kudelski, when designing Dr Majewski's villa at 7 Szpitalna Street in 1904, commissioned the artistic firm of Piotr Harasimowicz of Lviv to create a plastic wavy attic. The plasticity of the façade's supple lines was enhanced by a variety of balconies. Massive 'stone' or light openwork metal balustrades framed the balconies of the picturesque villas of Stanislavl.


The building on Batory Street (Korola Danyły 20), with its two semi-circular gables, is an example of a thematic composition with motifs derived from Egyptian-solar symbolism. The shape of the Egyptian pilons is particularly reminiscent of the side risalits flanking the building. Beautiful openwork butterflies spread across the balcony grilles of the house. Metalwork was one of those architectural elements that not only wildly enriched the architecture, but also became that hallmark that arouses a special fondness for Art Nouveau architecture.


It was the decorative elements - mascarons, artistic elaborations of windows and portals, grilles, ceramic tiles - which gave individual buildings their individual faces that played a decisive role in the matter of their stylistic affiliation. Thanks to them, even architecturally mediocre buildings gained artistic qualities - with the introduction of Art Nouveau forms in the second half of the first decade of the 20th century: flexible lines, complex plans, bent horseshoe shapes became a common rule.


The mastery of reinforced concrete structures allowed much better illumination of the new rooms through proportionally increasing windows due to the reduction of load-bearing walls. Glazed surfaces became fashionable - the larger, the more impressive. The façade of the house at 62 Lipowa Street (Shevchenko 62) was subordinated to the cylindrical shape of the glazed loggia, supported by massive consoles that bring the weight of the glass disk housing down to the ground.


Bottle glass blocks were used to add variety to the monotonous wall plane and to achieve interesting lighting effects in the interior of Lutsky's villa on Slowackiego Street (Tarnawskoho 22), or in the villa on Chopina Street 3.

A characteristic of "Stanislav Art Nouveau", which remained until the end of the Galician period, was the fondness for combining the textures of different materials. At the height of the style's development, their diapason expanded to the maximum: from the roughness of bruchite and roughly hewn stone to smooth stucco and smooth ceramic surfaces. Most often, however, the body of the house, varied by the artistic combination of several risalits and wooden carved roof supports, was framed by rustication, traditional for the "Stanislav Art Nouveau", such as the Kowalskis' house on Raclavitska Street (Hrynevychiv 3); or the villa on Lipova Street (Shevchenko 15). The gently outlined semicircular carvings of the window openings and portals further emphasised the softness of the rounded shapes of the entire block.

It is with great sadness that the vast areas of historic single-family housing once drowning in gardens have fallen prey to modern developers who have done irreparable damage to Stanislavov's urban space over the past decade.

Let the story of the Art Nouveau villas of Stanislavov be metaphorically closed by a villa built on Stefan Batory Street (Koroly Danylya 22 ) in 1910, as the date on the sewing of the building indicates. Above its arched parapet once towered a reclining female figure supported on an elbow in the manner of the Roman gods. It was one of three examples of full-plastic sculpture on the facades of the city's Art Nouveau villas. Unfortunately, the sculpture was devastated by the weather due to a lack of conservation care and slowly deteriorated. The second example - this time partially preserved - is the figure of a girl lying on top of the villa at 3 Chopina Street. The last fully preserved standing terracotta female statue alluding to the ancient legacy can still be admired in the corner of the villa in Slowackiego Street (Tarnawskoho 24).