Our large-scale reconstruction project of eight rooms in the Zubov Wing of the Catherine Palace, launched together with PAO Gazprom in October 2019, is moving forward. During a press tour on 23 August 2022 we informed local mass media representatives of our progress and plans.

The Private Space of Catherine II project includes the reconstruction of the Blue Study or Snuffbox, the Mirror and Silver Studies, the Bedroom, the Domed and Chinese Halls, the Dressing Room and the Raphael Room. Those were the private apartments of Catherine the Great, designed for her by the architects Charles Cameron and Giacomo Quarenghi in the eighteenth century and destroyed during the Second World War.

Work on the eighteenth-century masterpieces of Classicism is entrusted to the Tsarskoselskaya Amber Workshop, whose experts were responsible for the restoration of many other interiors at Tsarskoe Selo, including the Amber Room.

The whole process is paralleled with a serious research study by our museum specialists, based on archival documents, descriptions, Autochrome images, watercolours, black-and-white prewar photographs and surviving decorative fragments in the Tsarskoe Selo collection and other sources.

Painstakingly recreated elements of decoration are ready to be installed in five of the eight interiors: the Domed Hall, the Silver and Mirror Studies, the Snuffbox and the Bedroom. Over 10,000 decorative figures of eagles, flowers, leaves, vases, oak twigs and geometrical patterns have been produced and gilded.

The return of the vaulted ceiling in the Domed Hall is an accomplishment the restorers are especially proud of, as well as the revived delicacy of the Silver Study with its fantastic alternation of mirrors and painted pilasters.

Almost finished is the painted and glided plafond in the Mirror Study, as well as its original parquet floor which was looted during the Second World War and later found in Germany and brought back to Tsarskoe Selo. Also lost in the war but not found, the gorgeous parquets in the Snuffbox and Bedroom are now under reconstruction.