Adam Menelaws

Who was Adam Menelaws?

Adam Menelaws, also spelled Menelas was an architect and landscape designer of Scottish origin, active in the Russian Empire from 1784 to 1831. Menelaws achieved success in the first two decades of the 19th century as the designer of town and country residences and parks of Razumovsky and Stroganov families, and later worked for emperor Alexander I, specializing in Gothic Revival architecture. From 1825 to 1831 Menelaws, then in his seventies, became the first house architect of Nicholas I and de facto the leading architect of the Empire. Except for this final, properly evidenced, stage, life story of Adam Menelaws remains scarcely documented and has been reconstructed by biographers based on sketchy archive data and circumstantial evidence; Menelaws still "belongs to the category of almost unknown".