Briner Mansion

Julius Joseph Briner was born in 1849 in the La Roche community , located 30 miles southeast of Geneva ( Switzerland ), in a German Lutheran family. He spent his childhood in the community of Meriken , canton of Argau .

Engaged in silk trading in Shanghai . Having become a co-owner of a trading shipping company with branches in the Far East , Julius Briner moves to Vladivostok .

In the 80s of the XIX century he organized a company, with the participation of English and German capital, "Trading House Briner and Co." In 1890, Briner accepts Russian citizenship. In 1891, Julius Briner, together with the merchant of the second guild Andrey Nikolayevich Kuznetsov, founded the new company Briner, Kuznetsov and Co., which was engaged in stevedoring work in the port, storing goods and shipping them.

The company “Briner, Kuznetsov and Co.” also engaged in land operations in Vladivostok, having built several houses that became the decoration of the city. In particular, in 1913, according to the project of architect George Junghendel , a mansion was built on Aleutskaya Street, in which the Briner family lived. In 1920, the future Hollywood actor Yul Briner was born in the building, who received an Oscar for best actor in the film adaptation of the musical King and Me . Currently, the building houses the office of the Far Eastern Shipping Company ^[1] .

The building is three-story brick for stucco, rectangular in plan. According to the artistic decision, it is one of the best buildings in the romantic Art Nouveau style in Vladivostok, possessing expressive plasticity based on the use of streamlined, weathered forms and decoration elements typical of the Art Nouveau architecture, such as stucco ornaments, forged metal gratings with a pattern of wave-shaped lines, ornamental carved elements of door and window filling from stained oak, friezes from colored glazed tiles. The building has a romantic image with bay windows and balconies on consoles of various shapes, a tower volume of a staircase cut into the northern facade and a high oval half-front of the eastern facade combined with a massive rusticated base and a light flat cornice. A multi-march granite staircase leads to the building, which in itself is a work of art ^[2] .

• Monuments of history and culture of the Primorsky Territory. Materials for the arch. - Vladivostok: Dalnevost. books. ed., 1991 .-- 268 p.