Kamienica Korlansowska, Kraków

Kamienica Korlansowska is the historic townhouse at Floriańska 3, in Kraków’s Old Town. Its four-storey front preserves a long, repeatedly altered history behind one address. At ground level, notice the sixteenth-century Mannerist portal: Mannerism was the deliberately elaborate late-Renaissance fashion that played with classical forms.

The house began around the year thirteen hundred as a narrow, single-range brick dwelling. A second, slimmer section was added at the back in the fifteenth century, and a rear outbuilding followed in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Later in the sixteenth century, the second floor went up and the façade received its Renaissance makeover.

This home has held an unusually varied succession of residents and businesses: a royal physician, merchant families, doctors, pharmacists, and the Sztumer family, who ran a workshop here making Slutsk belts in the eighteenth century. A fire damaged the building in eighteen twenty-one, after which it was rebuilt in a restrained classical manner. The Ciechanowski family later kept a wine shop here.

In nineteen twelve, architects Ludwik Wojtyczka and Kazimierz Wyczyński remodelled the house and added a new outbuilding. During the major restoration completed in nineteen seventy-six, its cellars became a wine bar.