“I’ve not seen anything like this in Paris!”
V. Horodetsky has indeed created something unique in 1901-1902. To begin with, he risked to build an imposing mansion on top of a steep hill. The House seems to be an organic growth rising from the rock. Its exterior is ornamented with dozens of  sculptures in the form of plants and animals, mostly aquatic. All these creatures - crocodiles, fish, toads, mermaids,  plus a host of others - seem to have crawled out of the lake at the foot of the hill that had been drained shortly before  the construction of the House began. Some of the exotic animals are a sort of reminder that Horodetsky was an  enthusiastic hunter. He used to go to Africa to hunt almost annually, chartering a ship. Once he was reported to have   brought a live giraffe to give to the local zoo.Horodetsky was an excellent engineer, a man possessing a highly rational mind (the evidence of which is his house, which is still standing, built precariously at the top of the hill) and at the same time he loved fantasy and was endowed with a vivid imagination. Horodetsky was a shrewd businessman in addition to being an excellent artist. The ornamentation of the House is made of ferro-concrete, a new building material at the time when the House was being built, and it served as the best possible advertisement of the things one can do with the reinforced concrete.

The House combines the rationality of the West with the irrational dreaminess of the Orient. The functional parts of  the building have strict geometrical shapes (oval, round, rectangular) and all the decorative elements look like creations  of the organic world.

The Ukrainian architect of Polish ethnicity Wladislaw Horodecki  originally constructed the House with Chimaeras for use as his own upmarket apartment building during the period of 1901–1902. However, as the years went by, Horodecki eventually had to sell the building due to financial troubles, after which it changed ownership numerous times before finally being occupied by an official Communist Party medicine center until the early 2000s. When the building was vacated, its interior and exterior decor were fully recon

Horodecki was born into a noble Polish szlachta family of the Kornic coat of arms in the village of Szołudki (Sholudky, now Mukhivtsi Rural Council, Nemyriv Raion (district), Vinnytsia Oblast (province), Ukraine. His ancestors were big landowners (didych) in the Podillya (central part of Ukraine, the region with the best black soils). Horodecki graduated from the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg in 1890, while prior to that he finished a "realnoe uchilishche" (realshule is a type of secondary school of that time) in Odessa. After 1890 Horodecki moved to Kiev where he lived for almost 30 years.