Biography | Pavel Durov — The Seventh Floor of Singer House Where VK Ran

VKontakte did not start in this building.

It moved here.

In 2010 the company rented the seventh floor of Singer House, the 1904 Art Nouveau block at 28 Nevsky Prospekt, on the corner with the Griboyedov Canal and across from Kazan Cathedral.

The address is a landmark first and an office second. Pavel Suzor designed it for the Singer sewing-machine company under a height cap that forbade a New York-style tower; a glass dome and globe do the work of extra storeys without breaking the rule.

By the time Durov's engineers took the top floor, the lower storeys were again the House of the Book, the city's great bookshop, after a reconstruction that closed the building from 2004 to 2006.

The Village later walked the VK floor: a developers' hall of about 250 square metres, Finnish furniture, a meeting room in the glass cupola.

That cupola is the image visitors still come for. In the early 2010s it was also a working room.

This is the building associated with VK at the height of Durov's control, before the 2013–14 shareholder fight that ended with Mail.ru Group holding a majority and Durov out of the company.

The pin is the public facade on Nevsky, not a private flat and not a later Telegram office.

Singer House is a listed monument. You can stand under the globe without asking anyone's permission.

What you cannot do is treat the present tenant list as the 2010 floor plan. VK later expanded through the building; the company that occupies it now is not the company Durov ran.

The moment is the move in 2010, when Russia's largest social network took a room in the most photographed office on the avenue.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, File Singer House SPB 01.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0.