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02.02.2023

One more of the Alexander Palace rooms, the Hall with a Slide is open to visitors from 2 February 2023 — for the first time in 80 years.

The Hall with a Slide, a.k.a. the Mountain Hall, is part of the suite of state rooms and the fourteenth interior revived during the large-scale restoration of the Alexander Palace started in 2012 with funds from Russia's Ministry of Culture and the Museum. Designed by architect Giacomo Quarenghi in the late eighteenth century, the Hall's architectural ornaments are recreated thanks to financial support from the TransSoyuz charitable foundation, which also helped us restore the Agate Rooms and recreate the lapis-lazuli portals in the Lyons Hall of the Catherine Palace.

The Hall got its name thanks to a wooden slide presented to Nicholas I's children by their grandmother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (Paul I's spouse), and moved to the Alexander Palace from the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg in 1833. A slide is gorka in Russian, which means mountain in English, hence the room's other English name, the Mountain Hall. The tsar's children enjoyed sliding on rugs down the slide, which underwent some repairs in 1843, then stood in the Hall until 1941 and was lost during WWII. Under Nicholas II, beneath the slide was a storage place for his children's and his bicycles, and after 1917 there were toy cars and two pedal-driven carriages presented to Tsesarevich Alexei.

The restoration project was designed by St Petersburg's Studio 44 architectural bureau. Interior work and the slide's reconstruction were carried out by PSB ZhilStroy Ltd in 2019-21. Like previously in the other state rooms, the experts carefully restored all the surviving pre-1917 architectural decorations, such as the pale gray and mauve faux marble walls, the inlaid parquet and a fireplace. The frieze painted in imitation of faux marble and the oak doors and windows are reconstructed from old photographs.

The imitation windows in the lunettes, the half-moon shaped spaces above the frieze, are the original oil on canvases found under later paint layers during restoration. The paintings have been cleaned, their lacunae (damaged fragments) restored. The assumed stucco rosette in the centre of the ceiling turned out to be metal, most likely the one installed there during the palace renovations in the 1840s. The restorers dismantled it, repaired and reinstalled.

Before those renovations, according to archive documents of 1796-1809, the Hall was initially named the First State Room. Quarenghi's design included faux marble walls, pilasters with capitals, a tiled stove, the oak parquet, and the ceiling painted in imitation of stuccowork by artists Giacomo and Ferrari. The furniture set consisted of four gilded console tables with marble tops, eight gilded armchairs and twelve chairs. On the wall hung a large mirror in a gilded and painted frame. Two crystal girandoles were used for illumination.

A forty-light chandelier appeared in the Hall in 1836. Its reconstructed version is designed by the Tsarskoselskaya Amber Workshop and carefully produced by specialists of St Petersburg's Yuzhakova Studio.

The Hall's current furnishings from our museum collection: fine bronze and porcelain pieces; a French late eighteenth-century bronze mantel clock with Vestals Carrying the Sacred Fire by Pierre-Philippe Thomire's Workshop; bronze candelabra with Orpheus and Eurydice figures; and a pair of late eighteenth-century vases by St Petersburg's Imperial Porcelain Manufactory and a fire screen originating from this interior.