Ulrich Greenhouses (Ogrody Ulricha, szklarnie Ulrichów)

The story begins in 1805, when Jan Ulrich, a thirty-year-old gardener trained from the age of fourteen by his uncle Jan Krystian Mencke, the royal gardener, bought land on Ceglana Street (today Pereca Street) and opened Warsaw's first commercial garden. In 1835 he built glasshouses about a hundred metres long, described as the first of their kind in the city, to raise camellias, pineapples, grapes, peaches and date palms.

His son Krystian Jan Ulrich enlarged the business, opened a flower shop in the Grand Theatre building in 1868 and, squeezed by the growing city, founded a second nursery in 1877 in the village of Górce, along what is now Górczewska Street. Several sources date the first glasshouses on this site to 1878; by 1905 it had thirty modern glasshouses, two boiler houses and 8-metre chimneys. The two surviving glasshouses are dated 1898–1899 in the heritage register.

The firm then passed to Gustaw Ulrich and, from 1913, to his son-in-law Artur Machlejd, who during the war allowed the grounds to be used for smuggling food and hiding weapons. The land was nationalised in 1945 and the company in 1958, after the death of Krystyna Machlejdowa; the nursery carried on until it closed in the second half of the twentieth century. The site was entered in the heritage register in 2001, just before work on the Wola Park shopping centre began in 2002. The centre's owner, Ingka Centres, started conservation work in January 2021 with the approval of the regional heritage office, and the glasshouses reopened on 12 October 2022.

The complex consists of two above-ground glasshouses linked underground by a brick-built passage. When new, they were among the modern iron-framed glasshouses fitted with central heating. The municipal heritage record distinguishes segment A, made up of three southern bays and a central bay, and segment B, with five eastern bays, a corridor, the boiler house, part of the underground passages and three brick chimneys.

The restoration was designed by the Warsaw practice WXCA (Marta Sękulska-Wrońska, Szczepan Wroński, Monika Lemańska) together with the Poznań office LAB3, and built by the general contractor Budimex. The historic walls, the underground corridor and the original chimneys were kept, and gaps were filled with bricks modelled on the old ones. The steel frame was rebuilt following the original roof geometry, glazing details and white metal joinery, and the volumes were raised to about 7 metres. Inside, the walls were limewashed in the traditional gardeners' manner, while in the basement the walls still bear the black marks left by the coal that fed the heating.

In the nineteenth century the Ulrichs' fame rested on crops then rare in Poland: pineapples, much sought after by the Warsaw aristocracy, as well as citrus, palms, camellias, grapes and peaches. The restored glasshouses no longer produce anything. In the glasshouse given over to food, WXCA fitted out, among the counters, a group of orangeries with controlled temperature and humidity for exotic plants and a living green wall 7 metres high; the scheme also includes rows of fruit trees fitted with misting nozzles. The sources consulted publish no species list.

Outside, Ulrich Park, the family's former display garden, keeps trees of rare species, some of them planted in the nineteenth century, while an orchard of young fruit trees and a community garden devoted to environmental education complete the site.

The glasshouses stand at 124 Górczewska Street, on the border of the Wola and Bemowo districts, right beside the Wola Park shopping centre, within a site of about two hectares. The western glasshouse holds the food hall (bakery, bars, Asian, Middle Eastern and plant-based food); the eastern one houses a children's play space run by the Fikołki chain. Seasonal events include farmers' markets, open-air cinema and a winter holiday market. An hour is enough to see both glasshouses and walk round Ulrich Park, where the family villa and the small Zielona Chata house have also been turned into restaurants.