Bolshaya Ordynka, Building 66. A.S. Viktorson's Mansion Bolshaya Ordynka has preserved the unique atmosphere of old Moscow to this day. Here, eras and styles—Baroque, Classicism, Art Nouveau, and Constructivism—are closely intertwined, and urban estates alternate with churches. If you stroll along this street from Serpukhovskaya Square, you'll find the mansion, now numbered 66, on the left. The estate's history dates back to 1817, when a wooden one-story house with a mezzanine, lofts, and a stone basement was built for merchant Vera Nikolaevna Karpova. In the last decade of the 19th century, the building was already owned by Elizaveta Grigoryevna Maslennikova, the sister of the St. Petersburg merchant Nikolai Grigorievich Sushkin. According to documents from 1892, under the supervision of architect Sergei Konstantinovich Troparevsky, the addition of a second floor, plastering of the facades, and construction of a two-story outbuilding were carried out. In 1896, the estate passed to the ownership of 2nd guild merchant Alexander Semenovich Viktorson, an entrepreneur who manufactured cigar and cigarette tubes. Having acquired a plot on Bolshaya Ordynka, he commissioned the reconstruction of the mansion to Fyodor Nikitich Kolbe, a graduate of the School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and, at the time, an architect for Moscow's Khamovnicheskaya district. Among the master's most famous works are the apartment building for A.A. Kunin on Smolensky Boulevard and the repository and archive at the P.I. Shchukin Museum (now the K.A. Timiryazev Biological Museum) on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, and the Forum Cinema on Sadovaya-Sukharevskaya Street was rebuilt. Kolbe introduced a number of neoclassical elements into the façade of the main building (rusticated first-floor windows, ancient Greek window frames on the second floor) and redesigned the interior spaces. The property received a low, elegant fence on a granite foundation. Viktorson moved his factory from the previously rented L.V. Lyubenkov house (at the corner of Bolshoy and Maly Gnezdnikovsky Lanes, opposite the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker) to a specially converted outbuilding. This use of estates was typical for Zamoskvorechye at the time: middle-class merchants found it unprofitable to purchase additional land for factories; moreover, it offered the opportunity to directly oversee production. Soon after the establishment of Soviet power, the factory, now owned by Alexander Semyonovich's heirs, was nationalized and then completely closed. In 1924-1925, a third floor was added to the outbuilding and it was converted into apartments for the employees of the First Model Printing House. With the end of the Great Patriotic War, the entire old mansion complex was transferred to the GlavUpDK, and since then, diplomatic missions have been housed there.