For a quarter of a century, the TV presenter has been engaged in journalism, and his soul is sick with architecture, his hands reach for the saw and the plane. He himself built a house for his family, more precisely, several houses in which there is enough room for all his five children.
9 2017 June
– Here, 30 kilometers across New Riga, I have been living for eleven years. The first house was built one and a half kilometers from this place, on the other side of the Istra River, in the cottage village “Krasnovidovo-2”. After the divorce, he left him to his first wife Natalya (from his first marriage, Gleb has three children: Ivan, 23 years old, Stepan, 22, Tanya, 11 years old. – Approx. “Antenna”). Elya, my current wife, and I built the second house seven years ago. At first they tried to find a ready-made one nearby, but they could not find a suitable one. Then they bought a plot of land in a fantastically beautiful place – in the bend of a river, but on the outskirts of an ordinary village. But there is one problem – not our social stratum, but alcoholics, rusty pipes along the fence, neighbors with whom you cannot agree to take these pipes out … In late autumn, my wife, who remained there with her son (now Yegor is 6 years old. – Approx. “Antenna”) , It was scary. And no metal blinds on the windows could calm her down.
Gleb: “I’m just obsessed with the views from the window, so now in every house I have built in the village, the living room is located with windows to the east and to the south. There are no windows to the north at all. As a result, you go out onto the terrace, and no one can even see you from the neighboring houses. “
Amsterdam in the near Moscow region
Three years ago, I decided to deal with the problem radically and make my old dream come true – to build a village in which it would be most comfortable and surrounded by people who were close in spirit and society. For me, it was not so much a commercial project as a place of residence for the soul, so that I wake up, open my eyes and understand that I am not among the collective farm design, but in Amsterdam. All the fashionable avant-garde houses there are built in a style that I call “modern architecture”, although my son Stepan, a teacher at the British School of Design, taught me to say “polygonal”. I wanted to build such houses, to live in such houses.
He threw a cry to colleagues – television men, actors, with whom fate had brought together over the years of work. He said that I would take on all the hassle with the workers, the procurement of materials, I would build at cost, I would not earn a dime, but on one condition: your house would look the way I like it from the outside. He offered it to many, to the same Ivan Okhlobystin, who has seven children, which seemed to be a suitable option for him – nature, pine trees, a river nearby … But as soon as he found out that he had to pay his own money, he refused. The only person who agreed was the famous psychic Fatima Khadueva, whom I met on the “Island” project. When we discussed my plans with her for the first time, she looked at me carefully and said: “You will build quickly.” And she was right. Built quickly.
Not far from the village of Luzhki, where our house with Elya was located, in the cottage village “Aisty” they were selling land. We took plots with a large difference in elevation, they did not sell well from the owner of the village. The buyers thought that this kind of relief was bad. Yes, it’s a little harder to build. Yes, an individual project is needed. Yes, we had to stand next to the excavator when he was digging the foundation so as not to damage the luxurious pines, but now this difference is a plus for us. No fences are needed, privacy is ensured by the competent arrangement of houses relative to each other, the main thing is to think over everything in advance. I’m just obsessed with window views, so now every house I built in the village has a living room with windows facing east and south. There are no windows to the north at all. As a result, you go out onto the terrace, and no one can even see you from the neighboring houses.
On March 13, 2014, we gave money for land, and my friends and acquaintances twisted around their temples and said: “What are you doing?” Yes, I understood that the economy would fall, that the country would be worse off with money, but I took a chance. More precisely, the two of us took a chance. With a companion, friend of Elin’s father. My father-in-law Boris Vasilyevich, in the past the chief architect of the city of Balashov in the Saratov region, told a friend, the owner of the local construction market, about the idea of his son-in-law. Nikolai came, looked and said that he takes half. As a result, my project took shape. Each of us took five plots plus one for Fatima. Initially, I thought that I would build one house for myself, well, two, and the rest would be occupied by TV men and artists, but thank God that did not happen. Because building even for myself is hard labor, and if I coordinated every little thing with the owner, I would go crazy. So I did what I wanted.
I blinded myself – I built it myself
I have no architectural education. I studied at the Faculty of Physics and the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, all my life I was engaged in journalism. But if someone had looked at me attentively in childhood and noticed how much I love tinkering, they would have advised me to go to construction. I have an innate love for architecture. My grandfather graduated from the Civil Engineering Institute in 1941 and immediately became a lieutenant at the front. He built bridges, crossings, roads. And in the 60s he received his six hundred square meters and raised the house on his own. The project is not easy – it is based on an octahedron, although outwardly it looks round. As a boy, I helped my father and grandfather in endless remodeling of the house, then I built a dacha for my father.
When I was planning my own first dacha 12 years ago, an artist friend, having seen what I was drawn to, presented me with an almanac of a German publishing house about modern architecture. After examining it, I built a huge, 300 squares, black and orange house with giant vertical windows. Now I already know that such a big one is not needed for life. In the hall on the third floor, where there is a ping-pong table, a TV set and a sofa, no one comes in for months. Therefore, the second house was already 180 squares. Now the four of us fit into 165, and we feel good. You don’t need square meters to be happy. You can feel comfortable at 30, well-planned. In Japan, for example, such volumes are quite in demand.
I learned about the wonders of Japanese architecture from my favorite almanac. They post photos of really worthy buildings scattered around the world. I have already bought a couple of dozen of these books. I can flip through them endlessly, I have already memorized them, so even without an architectural education I picked up enough ideas and other people’s experience.
All projects of future houses were made by hand from foam board. You can buy it at any art salon. He showed his projects to our famous architect Totan Kuzenbaev. The house-cube, which he originally built for himself, he finalized. I had a tower designed there, but he demolished it, considered that it was superfluous. Totan said that I was not the first to invent the cube house. There are fifteen of them in Rotterdam Square, and one Israeli architect built a cottage community from cubes. But I didn’t pretend to be the first. I did what I liked.
At first I was going to build houses from laminated veneer lumber, but the style of a hut is still obtained from it because of the protruding joints – “overhangs”. And then my friend Nikolai found a cool German technology – the Holz Mauer array. This is not the name of the company, but of the material, in Russia it is made by several factories. It consists of seven layers of wood, knocked down with aluminum nails at the factory, one vertically, the other horizontally. It turns out an array as strong as concrete. Openings for windows are cut immediately at the factory, and the structure can be assembled.
Building houses of such a complex shape as mine is just hard labor. It’s like writing a novel: you need to link all the relationships of the characters, build lines. You need to climb the rafters yourself and check the geometry built by the carpenters. And for any small question, he still calls you and asks: how to do it? And no matter how detailed you design, you still face some kind of problem. For two years, while the construction was going on, I walked around and constantly came up with something. It was troublesome, but terribly interesting.
During the two years of construction, I have seen hundreds of one and a half workers … There were cases when all my workforce was raked indiscriminately by the FMS or the police. “Welcome to private business,” a familiar official commented on my adventures. But the police chief let the workers go without taking the money. He also sees that in front of him is not an entrepreneur, but an artist with all his might.
In the summer of 2015, when the sanctions finally pressed us and the dollar began to cost God knows how much, we put up our house in the village for sale. Three buyers were found in a week. It would seem that the outskirts of the village, 8,5 acres, a wooden house, well with gas, the view is awesome, but no security. And only 185 sq. meters. However, he left with a whistle for 23 million rubles. I even thought: was it too cheap? But I remember the rule of a car service: take a car – sell it, otherwise it will freeze for a year. Then we were faced with the need to urgently move somewhere. In my village I had a 100-meter house ready for my parents. And 165 meters for sale. Here we settled in. With two children, grandparents – Eli’s parents.
However, the house turned out to be incredibly comfortable – it has three floors, and everyone can scatter from each other. As a result, we settled down and do not want to move from there. Even in a pretentious cube house, in which it is 240 meters, and which we originally built for ourselves. Everything is ready there, even the furniture, but we use it as a guest. And in the end, we will most likely sell. And we will also sell the 100-meter house that I built for my parents. Two years ago, my dad died, my mother said that she did not need a house, an old dacha would be better. There is another one that I built later than the others. It has four-meter ceilings and is very comfortable inside – even the wardrobes are sophisticatedly built-in, apparently, I gained experience.
“We had to put a thin mesh on these windows after it opened one day, and Yegor fell out of there. It’s good that I landed on the soft. “
The elder sons helped in the construction of the village. Especially Vanya – he constantly came in his car, chock-full of building materials. Stepa is mainly with projects. Little Yegor met Vanya with a piece of reinforcement in his hands and said: “But this is called al-ma-tulya.” Actually, the youngest son deftly handles screwdrivers and a saw. When he was one and a half years old, he and I made furniture in the workshop of that house by the river. In addition to teaching, Stepan works in the workshop of an Italian designer. Very busy. Ivan graduated from the economics department of the university, works for Nissan, in the Product planning department. His boss, like Styopa’s, is an Italian who does not speak Russian. Come in large numbers here … In a good sense of the word.
We have an apartment in Moscow, and we spend the night there a couple of times a week as needed because of work. But I can’t sleep there, I wake up at six in the morning. If I had my way, I would not appear in the city at all. But these women … They need society, shops, so I hear from Eli: don’t lock me in the village.
I work as an author for Russian Sensations on NTV. One week is broadcast, these days are fully loaded, both day and night, but then two weeks are completely free. If we stay in the apartment, it is most often the three of us, with our husband and son. Yegor has a lot of things to do, so he needs to be driven around all the time. He only has one choi kwang do training, which is something between taekwondo and karate, five a week. Plus Chinese. And on weekends here in Luzhki, hockey. He turned six in the winter, he will go to school in the fall, they did not give them before, although he has been reading for a long time, believes, knows the multiplication table, writes in words. Ulyasha is with my parents at the dacha almost all the time. They help us a lot with the children, so we do without nannies. She is only two and a half years old, they thought whether to go to the garden, but then we need to be attached to the city, and we are lovers of summer cottages. Therefore, for now, this question has been left open.