Floating, sunken home

The Skolyk house is both an architectural marvel and an image of a home that cannot seem to settle on land. Built by Petro and watched by Stefania from Lindengasse, it rises in wavering, shell-like forms, conceals a stone woman, and transforms its surroundings into an imagined underwater world. Yet its dreamlike motion has a costly counterpart: when relentless rain batters the building and water enters through the roof, its apparent freedom from earthly laws becomes a very real danger to the people living inside it.

Design and Public Spectacle

Petro’s house seems to grow out of the ground like an enormous snail shell discovered in a vegetable garden. Though it ought to be rectangular, its blurred curves and protrusions make it look reflected in a distorting mirror. Narrow windows sit beneath the slate roofs; glossy ceramic tiles in reddish brown, gray-green, and blue wind around windows and doors and ornament the walls, columns, cornices, and arches. Seen from the street, the villa becomes a coiled serpent with a dozen mischievous heads, its tiles glittering like jeweled scales.

The house draws passersby who turn their hats, lace parasols, and elegant canes toward its windows. The attention sets it apart from the changing streetscape. Wooden hovels are burning or collapsing, to be replaced by brick houses from Ourman’s modern brickyard, many decorated with towers, arches, columns, ironwork, mosaics, and colored glass. Those buildings, however ornate, remain recognizably in place. The Skolyk house instead looks like a mirage, or a magic trick whose mystery no observer has solved. Its strangeness is not merely a matter of ornament: the building seems to resist the settled, dependable form that its neighbors embody.

A Hidden Figure and a Painted Sky

The house’s private marvels deepen the uncertainty of its appearance. Hidden behind a chimney across the street, beneath the linden treetops, sits a woman carved from pale sandstone. In some light, when the sun is not too bright, the stone takes on a pink hue, as though blood moved beneath its surface. Her gaze turns skyward; her hands reach forward in a gesture that could be expectation or prayer. Her hair is unruly and spread out, while the hollow at her nape and upper back follows the natural shape of the stone Petro used. He calls her the jar woman and watches her from below through the glass roof of the salon.

That roof makes the salon itself another constructed vision. Petro describes its colored glass, divided by copper and flecked with gold and clear panes, as a map of the starry sky. It contains constellations, a comet with a fiery tail, and planets in blue, violet, near-black, red, speckled brown, and gold. Sunlight scatters illusory patches across the room’s brightly lacquered furniture; moonlight makes the scene almost ghostly. The house thus holds several scales of imagined space at once: a concealed stone figure beyond the roofline and a cosmic image overhead, neither of which resolves the building into an ordinary dwelling.

Underwater Palace, Sunken Vessel

Petro imagines the city as an underwater palace. In his account, the house’s patterns are currents and stalks of seaweed, while its window openings become fish heads and deep-sea creatures that protect its inhabitants. He once dreamed of becoming a navigator, but remains unsure whether the sea he imagined exists or is merely a tale. Stefania answers his architectural fantasy with a change of emphasis: if the place is not a palace beneath the water, she says, it is a sunken boat.

The distinction remains unsettled in the house’s appearance. In sunlight, it shines and changes; in shadow, autumn haze, morning fog, or drizzle, it seems to blend into the weather. Stefania identifies its deepest effect as motion: the house appears to be going somewhere, unable to stay still, unlike ordinary buildings that sink into the earth and obey terrestrial laws. It sways with the wind and the branches of lilac and linden, writhing and dancing. The image of shelter consequently carries its opposite within it. A palace suggests protection and imaginative abundance, while a sunken vessel suggests that the home is already caught in the element against which it should provide refuge.

Leaking Roof and the Threat of Flood

The building’s instability is not only an illusion produced by light and weather. Petro can build a house, Stefania observes, but does not take care of it. He devotes himself to carving cherubim for the chapel of the Resurrection of Christ at the penitentiary rather than ensuring that his own roof is watertight. Stefania, meanwhile, changes the buckets catching rainwater and continues the work of cooking, cleaning, carrying Petro’s lunch to the cathedral or prison chapel, and caring for Adèle. The house’s fantastic design therefore coexists with domestic labor required to keep it habitable.

The year’s storms intensify that contradiction. Petro curses the workers, but Stefania sees little remedy in chasing drafts: water hangs in the air day and night, while underground currents strike the roof and walls and make the house pitch, threatening to wrench it from its foundations. Rain saturates clothes, linens, sheets, tablecloths, and heavy velvet curtains until they can be wrung out. Its steady patter enters dreams and thoughts, likened to someone endlessly frying onions in a celestial pan. The house that once seemed to float by choice now rocks under a flood that may carry it away.

An Image of Precarious Shelter

The house’s changing forms make it a focal image of precarious shelter. From the street it can be a shell, serpent, mirage, palace, or vessel; none of these descriptions cancels the others. Its surfaces invite spectators to treat it as spectacle, while Stefania’s work reveals the practical burden behind that spectacle: water must be caught, floors swept, and meals carried even as the building itself shudders. The gap between Petro’s elaborate artistic vision and the leaking roof is part of the house’s meaning, not an incidental flaw.

Its apparent disappearance gives the image its sharpest edge. The villa seems ready to vanish into the air, still present but on the verge of leaving no trace. During the storms, that visual impression approaches physical consequence: the currents threaten the structure’s foundations, and Petro invites Father Josef to lunch as though their world may soon disappear beneath the flood. The home’s dreamlike mobility is thus both imaginative freedom and vulnerability. It appears to escape the ground, but cannot escape the weather, the labor of maintaining it, or the danger of being swept away.