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10.12.2020

The Mauve or Lilac Room, a.k.a. the Mauve Boudoir of Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna in the Alexander Palace, was a favourite place of relaxation for the imperial family and their guests. Alexandra, often together with Nicholas II, came there to read books, play music, do needlework on a couch and drink tea at a round table. The room's winter decorations were fragrant bouquets of white lilacs from the imperial greenhouses nearby.

Part of Alexandra’s private rooms, the Mauve Boudoir was finished just two and a half months after the conditions for its design were posted in the newspaper St Petersburg Vedomosti on 24 June 1895.

After the highest approval of the design drawings, the factory F. Melzer & Co. produced a set of furniture, which consisted of built-in and stand-alone pieces, two plateaus (jardinieres) for plants, and carved panels for a Y. Becker piano.

Since almost all of the furniture items were destroyed during WWII, our Museum's research staff did a lot of work looking for archival documents and photographs, which are now used for the re-creation of the Mauve Room furniture. Some photographs come from our collection and others from the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow, allowing for our experts to view the furniture pieces from different angles and to produce exact and detailed replicas.

'The colour of the wall panels, doors and furniture required a separate study', says Anna Tarkhanova, our senior researcher who has been actively working on the reconstruction of the interior. 'The colour scheme of the panels had two shades, as we see in old photographs and in archival estimates from makers. In the archive, we also found a "recipe" with painting materials and their proportions, which helped our restorers find a modern analogue and apply it when painting the furniture in two tones.'

Also very helpful was the only surviving original item from the Mauve Room: the empress's desk added the Museum's collection in 1999. Not evacuated during the war, it was later found in a deplorable state in the Alexander Park by Anatoly M. Kuchumov, the former Alexander Palace curator. After the desk's paint layer tests in 2018, restorers determined the initial colour of its finish and thus made a decision on the colour scheme of the wall panels, built-in furniture and doors of the Mauve Room. Based on photographs and archival descriptions, the Tsarskoselskaya Amber Workshop (director Boris Igdalov) restored the desk and re-created its lost details in 2020. The Workshop also re-created the upholstered and cabinet furniture of the Mauve Room in accordance with the design developed in 2019-2020 by St. Petersburg's Studio 44 architectural bureau.

The cords, fringes, tassels and fabrics for the upholstery of the furniture  were re-created from historical samples in the collections of Tsarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk. The fabrics were made to the design developed by the Museum and the Renaissance restoration workshop in St Petersburg and based on similar historical samples and photographic materials. The analysis of the old fabrics – their fibers, thread types, colours and weaving styles – and the fabrication of new ones was carried out by specialists of the famous Italian Rubelli manufactory. The trims were made by the British Tassel & Trim and the Polish Re Kon Art. The order, manufacture and delivery process was personally supervised by Mr Janusz Szymanyak, director of Renaissance.