Nearby is a well-preserved specimen of seventeenth-century domestic architecture now No. 134 Lenin Street (Ulitsa Lenina). It was obviously the property of a wealthy citizen or member of the clergy and may have belonged to the Suzdal priest, Nikita Pusto-svyat, one of the Old Believers. An early nineteenth-century painting of Suzdal shows a similar house by the Cathedral of the Nativity in the kremlin. Although the house is built of brick everything about it shows the in­fluence of traditional wooden architecture. It consists of two square frames of different heights each covered with a saddleback roof and resembles the church from Glo-tovo which we saw in the kremlin. The larger, eastern section has two storeys, the lower one used for storage and such like with a vaulted ceiling which has survived. This large section is made of brick and is adjoined by a, smaller section with three attractive windows on the front wall. The windows have since been widened and given new surrounds. Houses of this kind stood out sharply against the humble wooden dwellings of the or­dinary townspeople. This rare specimen of domestic architecture helps us to understand why we find traces of the devices and forms characteristic of wooden build­ings in church architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and why the churches of this period pos­sess features which make them resemble ordinary dwell­ings, as we have mentioned on several occasions earlier. These tendencies reflect the tastes of the townspeople who were beginning to play an increasingly important role in society, which explains the gradual but clearly perceptible process of the secularisation of church architecture.