Three Brothers

In Riga's Old Town, the ensemble known as the Three Brothers rises up, made up of three historic buildings squeezed onto extremely narrow plots. The oldest secular stone building in the city, House No. 17, dates from the fifteenth century and shows features of the Dutch Renaissance, while its neighbors were built in the Mannerist and Baroque styles. The houses originally served as combined living and commercial spaces where people both traded and worked. One distinctive architectural feature is the wooden ceilings with central openings, through which goods were once hoisted by rope to the upper floors. After being destroyed in World War II, the buildings were reconstructed in the 1950s. Today they house the Museum of Latvian Architecture as well as the offices of the responsible heritage protection authority.