Look for the pale stone corner tenement with a rounded roofline, a steep dark roof, and griffin statues perched high above the decorated façade.
This house is a useful first lesson in symbols in plain sight. The griffins, the corner domes, the borrowed Renaissance swagger... none of it is just decoration. In Warsaw, surfaces often work like coded messages, and this building is practically shouting in silk gloves.
Julian Fuchs, the confectioner who commissioned it for his family, did not want an ordinary rental house. He wanted a showpiece at Three Crosses Square: luxury apartments for the family on the first floor, tenants above, and a façade that announced success before anyone even rang the bell. A man who sold sweets clearly understood display.
The designer, Józef Huss, made that display unusually clever. He borrowed the domed corner form from Królikarnia, the Rabbit House, which he had restored elsewhere in Warsaw. And those griffins? Locals tend to notice them as ornaments, but they quietly echo the griffins of the demolished Reichsbank building in Berlin. So even in the eighteen eighties, this façade already carried an afterimage of something lost.
Take a second and study the upper corner... which details feel merely fancy, and which start to look like deliberate statements of identity, ambition, maybe even memory?
The building kept changing roles. In nineteen eighteen, Anna Jakubowska opened a private girls' middle and high school here. After the war displaced it for good, the city later marked her work with a plaque on the front. In nineteen forty-four, fire tore through the house and stripped away much of Huss's rooftop drama. For decades it stood simplified, with only a couple of griffins surviving. If you want a quick sense of that transformation, have a look at the before-and-after image in the app.
Then came the comeback: restoration in two thousand five and two thousand six, the domes and griffins rebuilt, and an extra office floor tucked into the roof. So this building teaches you how Warsaw works: the costume changes, the message lingers. Next, walk about four minutes into Three Crosses Square, where those messages stop being private and start becoming public.
