Boris Azarenko and Moscow's New Urban Standard

Written by Loren Vax

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For Boris Azarenko, residential development has always been tied to the broader urban living experience. When he co-founded Vesper in 2012, it was with the premise that living conditions actively shape people's everyday wellbeing. That was why the company focused on projects that combined architecture, wellness technologies, cultural spaces, and carefully designed urban infrastructure in Moscow’s historic districts.

Boris Azarenko

The financial mind behind Boris Azarenko’s vision

Boris Nikolaevich Azarenko came to development through finance. He obtained a degree in this field and spent his early career, from 1995 to 2005, working in the Russian banking system at a time when that system was taking shape after the collapse of the USSR. During that time, Boris Azarenko gained experience with investments and equities markets.

The skills gained in that period – evaluating assets, managing investment risks – later proved useful in Boris Azarenko’s entrepreneurial career. His first move into property development was the co-founding of a company named Evocom. It went on to deliver several commercial and residential projects in Moscow and other Russian cities. The largest one ran to over 3 million square feet of commercial property. To work on the designs, Azarenko brought in a top-tier international architecture firm: NBBJ.

Some of Evocom’s projects were completed as planned, others were repositioned as market conditions shifted. But Boris Azarenko accumulated practical experience in development finance – and the resources that he could reinvest in a new venture.

The idea for the new venture came from market analysis. At the time, Moscow's city center was full of underused industrial land and historical buildings, aging and often inadequately repurposed. To Boris Azarenko, that looked like an opportunity. So, in 2012, he and his business partner Denis Kitaev co-founded Vesper. The idea was to acquire undervalued assets in central Moscow and redevelop them into elite apartment blocks.

Location and architecture as infrastructure for life

In Boris Azarenko’s view, architecture is more than just decoration applied to a building. It is also the mechanism by which a building works for the people inside it. That framing lies at the core of Vesper’s product vision.

The company’s early portfolio was built by acquiring historical buildings in central Moscow and turning them into boutique houses – low-density luxury residences with a limited number of apartments and a private, highly personalized living environment. To ensure this privacy, Boris Azarenko deliberately avoided integrating public retail or restaurant spaces into boutique buildings.

Another level of luxury was added by the sheer location of these projects. All of them sit in some of the city’s most prestigious central districts. Gelrikh’s House is in Prechistensky Lane, surrounded by museums and foreign embassies. St. Nickolas is on Nikolskaya, the pedestrian street that connects the Red Square to Lubyanka. Bulgakov and Levenson, the latter now under construction, are located near Patriarch's Ponds, an area with many upscale residences and fashionable restaurants. Chekhov is just a 15-minute walk from the area, with its own entrance to the Hermitage Garden. And Sovremennik is situated on Chistye Prudy (the Clean Ponds), another prestigious central neighborhood.

To execute at this level, Boris Azarenko and the team brought in top architects and designers. For Vesper’s debut, Gelrikh’s House, they commissioned Tsimaylo Lyashenko & Partners. This evolved into a long-term collaboration on multiple other projects. Another frequent collaborator is the British interior design practice, Aukett Swanke.

In architecture, Boris Azarenko’s goal was to create not merely buildings, but urban landmarks. When the project concerned restoration, an additional challenge was preserving as much of the original building as possible while still creating a comfortable and modern environment for the residents. In interior design, the focus is on what the company describes as the idea of “honest comfort”: all apartments are sold fully finished with high-quality natural materials.

Vesper Tverskaya – took the privacy and luxury standards to a new level. Boris Azarenko launched the project in 2017 with Fairmont as a partner. Designed by SPEECH (architecture) and Rockwell Group (interiors), it is an apartment complex with fully furnished apartments and hotel-like services. Housekeeping, valet assistance, wellness and spa facilities – everything in Vesper Tverskaya is designed to remove everyday routine from residents’ lives.

Vesper Tverskaya

Thinking at the neighborhood scale

In 2017, Boris Nikolaevich Azarenko finalized the purchase of a former paint and varnish factory in Presnensky District. The company turned the 11-acre site into a mixed-use quarter called Lucky: eight new residential buildings with 619 apartments, plus a socio-cultural cluster in seven historical constructions.

The commercial part of the district – the so-called “lower city” – is oriented toward the public. Restaurants, cafes, a farmers' market, fitness facilities, a school, art spaces, children’s playgrounds – unlike boutique residences, here all of this is central to the concept. Anyone can walk around the inner courtyards of Lucky and enjoy the infrastructure, as well as the surroundings: the design by Meganom masterfully weaves together contemporary architecture and restored historical buildings. 

Residential courtyards – the “upper city” – remain fully private. The project thus makes sure that the amenities serve the residents but don't intrude on them.

Lucky evolved into one of Vesper’s most commercially successful projects. Boris Azarenko’s financial instinct paid off: the per-square-foot value doubled over the construction cycle, and the project was later acquired by a major investor.

Now, Boris Azarenko’s team is building a new residential quarter: Vesper Kutuzovsky. Construction began in December 2025 and is currently underway. The Kutuzovsky complex is slightly smaller in area than Lucky, but comprises roughly the same number of apartments – 648 – in 10 new-build houses. The studio designing them, ODA Architecture, is known for its mixed-use projects. Its slogan – We Are How We Live – aptly describes its urbanism-first logic. The firm thinks not just about individual apartments or house facades, but about how residents will actually live in the place. The project includes a fully pedestrian inner territory, ground-floor retail and restaurants, a fitness club, a kindergarten, and a landscaped park. The site itself adds to the appeal. The Moskva River embankment is within walking distance. The transport connections reach both the Kremlin and the Moscow International Business Center, known as Moscow-City, in roughly equal time. 

Built-in wellbeing

The decisions in elite residential development are not limited to a house’s exterior and interior design, nor to the surrounding infrastructure. What’s equally important is the comfort of inhabiting an apartment. Boris Azarenko and his team understood that the atmosphere inside the home constitutes a large part of the resident’s everyday experience. 

That’s how the planning logic was born. Azarenko has described Vesper's approach to layouts as mapping how a person moves through the apartment from morning to night. Bedrooms are positioned as the final private destination of the day, with direct access to dressing rooms and bathrooms. Children's rooms are designed as self-contained spaces with their own storage and bathroom. Kitchens are divided into a working zone and a social zone because residents frequently own original artworks that have to be protected from cooking air.

The attention to daily experience is reflected in the buildings’ technical equipment. The company installs multi-stage water purification systems, and Tion air filtration cleans indoor air to medical-grade standards. In some of the houses, sound-insulating windows are installed. And smart home systems give residents direct, precise control over lighting and climate.

Azarenko’s cultural agenda

For the Vesper co-founder, the quality of a living environment has never been purely a question of square footage. From early on in Vesper's history, Boris assumed that cultural life is part of what makes a place worth living in.

Art is integrated into most of Boris Azarenko’s projects. Modern artwork is presented in the lobby of Lucky and in Vesper’s sales house that opened inside the Tverskaya complex in 2025. A series of bronze sculptures by Belgian artist Guido Deleu sits at the center of Lucky’s lower city. And several buildings have hosted cultural events. Multiple art and fashion exhibitions in the penthouse of Vesper Tverskaya, a pre-auction exhibition of collectible design objects organized with MIRRA Gallery in the interiors of Nabokov, and the use of Levenson as the site for Damien Hirst's Pharmacy installation are just a few examples.

Beyond individual events, Boris Azarenko has positioned Vesper as a supporter of Moscow's cultural institutions – the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Zotov Center, among others.

Boris Azarenko’s departure and the future of Vesper

Boris Azarenko stepped down from his CEO role in 2022 and stopped participating in Vesper’s daily operations. He remains a shareholder in the company. The business is now run by a new management team, which has continued to expand the portfolio.

There are two large projects underway that follow the already established urbanism-first approach. The first one is in Donskoy District. There, the company will build a traditional residential development with educational facilities, social infrastructure, underground parking, and sports grounds. The other project, on Berezhkovskaya Embankment, is the largest one in the company’s history so far. The acquired site spans 65 acres of land. The territory will have residential buildings combined with retail and office space, public infrastructure, and an 8.6-acre park. 

The company is also planning to move into a new, fully commercial format with a standalone gastronomic cluster in Troitsky Administrative Okrug.