"Usadba Kamenki" — a cottage settlement (later redesignated a residential complex) in the selo of Kamenki, Bogorodsky District, Nizhny Novgorod Region, 19 kilometers from Nizhny Novgorod along the Arzamas highway. Construction began in 2010; the developer was OOO Volzhskaya Usadba, for which the settlement was its first project. By 2023, 240 houses had been built here, housing more than 500 residents.[1][2]
Concept
The settlement was conceived as a comprehensively developed area with its own service and social infrastructure; it became part of the selo of Kamenki, which already had a school, a post office, a Sberbank branch, a pharmacy, and shops.[1][3]
Utilities were connected centrally: gas and electricity from the main networks, water from the estate's artesian well via a shared water supply system, and heat and hot water from an individual gas boiler in each house.[4]
The settlement was marketed together with its surroundings. Descriptions of the area for prospective buyers mentioned a natural spring at the turnoff from the highway toward Arzamas, to which people drive even from the city to collect water; Chizhkovskoye Lake, seventeen kilometers away — a widening of the Kudma River dammed at the village of Chizhkovo; a ski slope in Khabarskoe, fifty-two kilometers away; and the Mega shopping center, twenty-nine kilometers away, which buyers were encouraged to reach "via Olgino, bypassing all the complicated interchanges."[3]
Gas will be piped to every House. No canisters. Everything is centralized. […] Electricity. It's already there. We can supply 7 kW to each house. Will that be enough?
Houses and Prices in 2011
Three types of housing were offered for sale — a detached house, a duplex for two families, and a townhouse, as well as a house built to a custom design. The plot for the detached house and the duplex was nine sotkas, and for the townhouse — two.[5]
The houses were set on bored reinforced piles three meters long: the loamy, moderately frost-heaving soils of Bogorodsky District freeze to a depth of 1.8 meters. The walls were laid from aerated concrete blocks 375 millimeters thick, and the floor structures were made on wooden beams.[6]
The prices from autumn 2011 give a sense of what a finished country house near Nizhny Novgorod cost in the early 2010s. The developer published them together with a breakdown of the estimate by line item — from foundation backfill and walls to roads and landscaped areas.[5]
| Home type | Total area | Heated area | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual, no attic storey | 172 m² | 132 m² | 4,600,000 rubles |
| Individual, with finishing | 172 m² | 132 m² | 4,900,000 rubles |
| Individual, with finishing and attic storey | 232 m² | 192 m² | 7,100,000 rubles |
| Duplex, without finishing | 129.61 m² | 97.4 m² | 3,850,000 rubles |
| Duplex, with finishing | 129.61 m² | 97.4 m² | 4,100,000 rubles |
| Duplex, with finishing and attic storey | 189.61 m² | 157.4 m² | 5,100,000 rubles |
| Townhouse | 104.88 m² | 84.09 m² | not for sale pending receipt of permit documentation |
How the settlement was marketed
The progress of construction and sales was displayed on an interactive map of the estate: each house on the plan listed its street and number, plot area, number of storeys, construction phase, readiness status, and availability — vacant, reserved, or sold. The streets of the first construction phase were named Vidnaya, Solnechnaya, and Tsvetochnaya.[4]
The settlement was also advertised on television — a commercial ran on TNT and the Volga channel.
Entry to the grounds was secured with a guarded, round-the-clock checkpoint and a barrier gate.[1]
Developer
OOO "Volzhskaya Usadba" was registered on 9 June 2010 at the address of the settlement itself — Kamenki village, Sosnovaya Street, building 8; the company's primary activity was listed as the purchase and sale of its own real estate.[7]
The developer described itself as a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical holding company Katren and financed construction with its own funds, calling Usadba Kamenki its first project.[5] The sole participant listed in the legal entities register was Vladimir Nikolaevich Spiridonov — co-founder and CEO of the Novosibirsk pharmaceutical distributor Katren, the third largest in the country; the holding company included, alongside the Melodiya Zdorovya pharmacy chain, several construction firms as well.[7][8]
The construction venture did not survive the decade: in March 2018 a bankruptcy trustee was appointed, and on 21 June 2019 Volzhskaya Usadba was liquidated pursuant to an arbitration court ruling.[7]
In its final years the developer sought money wherever it could. In August 2014 it launched a mortgage program with Promsvyazbank; in July of the same year it ran a promotion called "A House for 300 Rubles," raffling off a property valued at 5.4 million rubles — the winner received the right to purchase it at a 99.9 percent discount off the list price.[9] In January 2015 Volzhskaya Usadba offered private individuals a promissory-note loan at 19 percent per annum, "borrowing money from anyone who would like to profit from the growth of the real estate market."[10]
In March 2017 the company's authorized capital was cut from seventy million rubles to ten thousand — one year before the court's bankruptcy ruling.[7]
What became of the settlement
As early as June 2016, nine months before the bankruptcy claim was filed, a new limited liability company, Prigorod Life, was registered at a neighboring address in Kamenki with an authorized capital of 174.6 million rubles, in which Spiridonov holds a 76 percent stake. The developer Vybor Stroy NN and the management company Zagorodnaya Servisnaya Sluzhba — headed by the former director of Volzhskaya Usadba — are also registered at the same address on Sosnovaya Street. The settlement's domain name is today registered to Prigorod Life.[11]
The settlement outlasted its developer. Sales and construction continued: by 2023 Usadba Kamenki had 240 homes built, with more than five hundred residents, and the settlement itself had grown from a cottage development into a residential complex featuring townhouses, duplexes, and quadruplexes.[1]
By that point the individual houses had all been sold; homes were delivered with pre-finishing work completed, and buyers were offered a rural mortgage at 2.7 percent per annum.[1][2]
The settlement is maintained by ZSS LLC, which operates a dispatch service, a resident's personal account portal, and a mobile app for paying fees and submitting meter readings.[12]
The infrastructure was completed over the years: the settlement's own water intake facility with a capacity of up to 486 cubic meters per day, a water treatment plant, a children's out-of-town club, and a free school bus to the Kamenskaya school. Bus No. 208 runs to the city from the "Scherbinki-2" bus station, which is 19 kilometers from the settlement.[2]
Kamenki Village
The village stands on the Unkor River, a tributary of the Kudma River, between Nizhny Novgorod and Bogorodsk. Its main attraction is an 18th-century stone Church of St. Nicholas, which remains active to this day.[3]
In the description of the surrounding area that the developer provided to buyers, the village's founding was attributed to the 16th century.[3]
By the 2020s, Kamenki itself had a school, a kindergarten, a clinic, a church, a museum, and shops, and public transport ran to the city.[1]
April First, 2013
On April 1, 2013, the developer published a news item on its website under the headline "The tallest building in the Volga Federal District will be built 19 km south of Nizhny Novgorod in 2018." It announced an agreement with the regional government to construct a 146-meter, roughly fifty-story tower in the center of the settlement — complete with a rooftop helipad, a restaurant complex of ten thousand square meters, and a ten-level underground parking garage for five hundred cars. The same article mentioned negotiations over a "Kamenki" metro station that would connect the settlement to the stadium being built at the Strelka for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, as well as a 360-bed hotel for fans.[13]
Specially for football fans, dedicated high-speed Sapsan train services will be organized along the Moscow–Chaglovo route.[13]
The punchline of the prank was in the last line: Chaglovo is a tiny railway halt near the settlement, marked on the developer's own map of the surrounding area. The page was later removed from the site and today can only be read via a web archive copy.[13]
Sources
- kamenki.com — website of "Usadba Kamenki" — Main page of the "Usadba Kamenki" residential complex (archive)
- kamenki.com — About the "Usadba Kamenki" residential complex (archive)
- web.archive.org — kamenki.com (page snapshot of May 11, 2011) — The immediate surroundings of the "Usadba Kamenki" settlement and the village of Kamenki (archive)
- kamenki.com — kamenki.com (page snapshot of November 2, 2011) — Map of the estate and the settlement's utilities
- web.archive.org — kamenki.com (page snapshot of November 6, 2011) — Prices and floor areas of houses, duplexes, and townhouses at "Usadba Kamenki" (archive)
- web.archive.org — kamenki.com (page snapshot of February 4, 2012) — Homeownership: foundation, walls, and floors of the cottage (archive)
- rusprofile.ru — Unified State Register of Legal Entities (according to Rusprofile data) (archive)
- Vedomosti — A pill for the bank: on the owners of pharmaceutical distributor Katren
- nta-nn.ru — news agency NTA-Privolzhye — A house to be raffled off at the "Usadba Kamenki" cottage settlement, July 17, 2014
- web.archive.org — Usadba Kamenki — Bill-of-exchange program "2 in 1", January 16, 2015 (web archive snapshot) (archive)
- egrul.nalog.ru — Federal Tax Service of Russia (archive)
- zssnn.ru — management company OOO "ZSS" — Usadba Kamenki: services, rates, and resident personal account (archive)
- web.archive.org — Usadba Kamenki — The tallest building in the Volga Federal District to be built 19 km south of Nizhny Novgorod in 2018, April 1, 2013 (web archive snapshot) (archive)