The famous house at the intersection of Zagorodny Prospect and Rubinshtein, Razezzhaya and Lomonosov Streets was built on the site of a three-story building once owned by merchants Lapin. By order of Schneer Joff, who had bought a plot in Zagorodny Prospekt, architect Alexander Lishnevsky erected a six-storey building in the style of classicism and Art Nouveau at the beginning of the XX century. The distinctive feature of the house is a tower with five round lucarn windows, topped with a domed roof, decorated with columns, balusters and vases. On the second floor of the building there was a cinema with 300 seats.

After the construction had been completed, Joff was forced to put the house up for sale due to debts to the City Credit Society.

After the revolution, the house was nationalized.

At the time when the house belonged to the Lapin family, the poet Nikolai Nekrasov taught history, arithmetic and spelling within its walls. The "new" building had its own famous tenants: ten years before World War II, one of the apartments was occupied by a physicist Matvey Bronstein, whose wife was the publicist Lydia Chukovskaya, the daughter of the famous writer, who was visited by her close friend Anna Akhmatova.