Artist Turns Soviet-Era Houses Near Kyiv Into Guesthouses

By Elena Vasquez

A 1960s house in the village of Derev'yana near Kyiv now carries a mural inspired by Ukrainian modernism and Suprematism on its facade — the visible marker of Hata Yarova, the first of three Soviet-era homes that artist Oksana Levchenya (Konstantinovska) is converting into guesthouses.

The idea started during the pandemic. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the project has taken on a different weight. "Continuing to build during the war is, in a way, an act of defiance against the death and destruction that Russia has brought to us," Levchenya said, speaking by video call from Kyiv during a power cut.

A small team of builders, led by a man approaching his seventies, does the work. Renting the houses exists mainly to cover costs and keep the team employed. "These houses serve as places of calm and restoration for those who have remained in Ukraine," she said. "We are all working enough for three people now, and all of us need rest and comfort."

What shaped the project?

Levchenya's childhood supplied another motive. After her parents' divorce, she lived with her grandmother, then her aunt, while her mother trained as a surgeon. At nine, she moved into one of the low-cost Soviet apartment blocks known as Khrushchyovka.

"Throughout my early childhood, I was always staying in other people's homes, dreaming of a place of my own," she said. "The Hata Yarova project was born from a desire to create a space in which time is somehow suspended – a place that does not belong to any particular period."

Her method, which she calls "intuitive additive architecture," builds the final form through slow interventions rather than a fixed blueprint.

• Replacing the roof allowed an attic level with guest rooms.
• The original porch was dismantled and its timber planks reused as the staircase.
• A new extension in the porch's place holds the kitchen and bathroom.
• Oversized arched windows, salvaged from a private residence's renovation, were cut down and reassembled in a new composition.
• An old timber platform from the former Kosmos factory became outdoor decking.

The bathroom layers unglazed tiles from the 1960s and 70s, rare hand-painted pieces from Kharkiv, and contemporary Spanish ceramics.

How does family history surface in the interiors?

The interiors mix vintage finds and pieces from friends, including a stove from a restaurant. One object carries more charge than the rest: an antique wooden chest from the 1930s, bought at a fair and made during Soviet collectivisation, when private farms were folded into state-controlled collective farms.

"My family has lost its inheritance and material possessions several times: first in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, and again during the upheavals of the 1930s," Levchenya said. "Today history has cruelly repeated itself; the elders of my family - my mother, her sister, and her brother – have once again lost their homes in Krasnopillia, a rural settlement in Sumy Oblast."

That history taught her family that the most durable inheritance is intellectual — knowledge and skills, not possessions. The chest stands for what can actually be carried through history: only what is essential and portable. "It is an authentic domestic object, originally used to store textiles and rugs, and therefore carries a direct connection to the material culture of the home," she added.

Where do the textiles come from?

Textiles, which Levchenya calls a "matriarchal medium" connecting women across generations, run through her own practice. As a child, her favourite plaything was gauze from her mother's medical supplies, which she turned into toys. She returned to textiles through research into traditional Ukrainian craft — and through frustration with painting, "which began to feel too confined and controlled," she said. "I wanted to have more freedom to experiment and make mistakes."

Her textile sculptures and woven wall-hangings splice local traditions with Ukrainian modernism and contemporary imagery. "I find a particular magic in combining opposing textures and creating structures that contain a certain paradox within themselves," she said. "This can happen through visual imagery - for example, Pac-Man combined with traditional Ukrainian ornament - or through the contrast of materials."

Her work appears in the house itself, including a white totem made from knitwear-factory textile remnants and rugs from her brand, OLK Manufactory.

While the other two houses await their transformation, Levchenya and her team are writing a philosophy to hold the growing community together. "I would love to make the project larger in scale, and perhaps eventually international," she said. "But the immediate plan is to survive – and to win the war."