A 1960s rural Ukrainian midcentury house near Kyiv has been transformed into a rich tapestry of found materials, antiques and creative interventions. Hata Yarova, which stands out in the village of Derev’yana thanks to a mural on its facade inspired by Ukrainian modernism and Suprematism by Levchenya, is the first of three neighbouring Soviet architecture-era homes that Ukrainian artist Oksana Levchenya (Konstantinovska) is remodelling as guesthouses, turning an ordinary, anonymous typology into something distinctive and woven with narrative.
Inside Oksana Levchenya's Ukrainian midcentury house project
The idea for the guest houses emerged during the pandemic, but the project has taken on new meaning since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 'Continuing to build during the war is, in a way, an act of defiance against the death and destruction that Russia has brought to us,' Levchenya tells me via video call from Kyiv, her background darkened by a power cut.
She relies on a small group of builders, led by a man approaching his seventies, and the goal of renting the houses is largely about covering costs and sustaining the teams’ livelihoods. 'These houses serve as places of calm and restoration for those who have remained in Ukraine. We are all working enough for three people now, and all of us need rest and comfort.'
Levchenya’s own childhood was another spur. After her parents’ divorce, she stayed with her grandmother and later her aunt while her mother pursued a career as a surgeon. At the age of nine, she went to live with her mother in one of the meagre apartments allotted to physicians during the Soviet era in low-cost blocks, called Khrushchyovka.
'Throughout my early childhood, I was always staying in other people’s homes, dreaming of a place of my own,' she explains. 'The Hata Yarova project was born from a desire to create a space in which time is somehow suspended – a place that does not belong to any particular period.'
She calls her approach 'intuitive additive architecture': an organic method of adaptation, in which the final form emerges through a slow process of interventions and additions, rather than from a fixed blueprint. Replacing the roof gave her a chance to add an attic level housing guest rooms. The original porch was dismantled, its timber planks reused as the staircase. In its place, Levchenya added an extension housing the kitchen and bathroom.
Salvage is a defining feature of the project: oversized arched windows rescued from the renovation of a private residence have been cut up to suit the scale of the house and reassembled in a new composition, while an old timber platform from the former Kosmos factory was refashioned as outdoor decking.
In the bathroom, reuse becomes even more expressive, with unglazed tiles from the 1960s and 70s mixed with rare, hand-painted pieces from Kharkiv, and contemporary Spanish ceramics.
The interiors are kitted with vintage finds and pieces collected from friends, such as a stove from a restaurant. An antique wooden chest from the 1930s purchased from a fair is a poignant nod to her family history, made during the time of Soviet collectivisation, when privately owned farms were consolidated into state-controlled collective farms.
‘My family has lost its inheritance and material possessions several times: first in the aftermath of the October Revolution of 1917, and again during the upheavals of the 1930s,' she explains. 'Today history has cruelly repeated itself; the elders of my family - my mother, her sister, and her brother – have once again lost their homes in Krasnopillia, a rural settlement in Sumy Oblast.'
Rebuilding from these ruptures has shaped a particular understanding of value within the family: that the most enduring forms of inheritance are not material, but intellectual - one’s knowledge, skills and capacities. The chest becomes a metaphor for the limits of what can be carried through history: only what is essential, portable, and internalised. It is more than symbolic, however. 'It is an authentic domestic object, originally used to store textiles and rugs, and therefore carries a direct connection to the material culture of the home,' she adds.
Textiles have always had a particular emotional resonance for Levchenya, who describes them as a 'matriarchal medium' that connects women across generations. Thanks to her mother’s medical supplies, Levchenya’s favourite plaything as a child was gauze, which she used to create toys. Later, she was drawn to them again through her research into traditional Ukrainian craft heritage, but also a frustration with painting, 'which began to feel too confined and controlled,' she says. 'I wanted to have more freedom to experiment and make mistakes.'
Today she creates textile sculptures and woven wall-hangings that draw from local traditions, spliced with Ukrainian modernism and contemporary imagery. 'I find a particular magic in combining opposing textures and creating structures that contain a certain paradox within themselves,' she explains. 'This can happen through visual imagery - for example, Pac-Man combined with traditional Ukrainian ornament - or through the contrast of materials.'
Her own work is present in the house, including a white totem made from remnants of textile from a knitwear factory, and rugs made by her brand OLK Manufactory.
Hata Yarova and the subsequent houses are about 'combining contrasting aesthetic worlds that seem almost incompatible,' she says. While the other two houses undergo their transformation, Levchenya and her team are developing a philosophy to unite this growing community. 'I would love to make the project larger in scale, and perhaps eventually international,' she says. 'But the immediate plan is to survive – and to win the war.'