The estate began to take shape in 1756 when I.I. Vorontsov-Velyaminov built a small house with corner pilasters along Bolshaya Nikitskaya. In the 1770s, the property passed to the Dolgorukovs, who expanded the estate to Povarskaya Street and built two symmetrical service wings with round corner rooms at the edges of the main house. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the main house was raised with a mezzanine, adorned with two porticos, and designed in a strict classical style.

In 1812, the house was occupied by the French, but the fire did not affect it. In the second half of the 19th century, the estate passed to the Bode-Kolychev barons and remained in their possession until 1917. Baron Mikhail Lvovich Bode acquired the estate around 1853 along with the Likino estate in modern Peredelkino. His mother, Natalia Fedorovna Kolycheva, was the last of her line, so in 1876, Mikhail Lvovich added his mother's surname to his own and became Baron Bode-Kolychev. He was married to Alexandra Ivanovna Chertkova. Under him, the estate's courtyard acquired a modern enclosed composition. In 1859, a house church dedicated to St. Philip (Kolychev) was added to the eastern end of the main house, where I.S. Aksakov and A.F. Tyutchev were married in 1866. Mikhail Lvovich, being a historian and archaeologist, turned the house into a museum of antiquities, which included a hall with the family tree of the Kolychevs and Bodes. He collected and published the genealogy of the Kolychev family in the book "The Boyar Family of Kolychevs."

In the mid-19th century, the widow of A.S. Griboedov, Nina Chavchavadze, stayed here, and the Bode barons preserved the furnishings of her room as a memorial.

Mikhail Lvovich died in 1888, and the estate passed to his daughter Natalia Mikhailovna, who was married to Count Fyodor Lvovich Sollogub. He died in 1890 at the age of 42. Natalia Mikhailovna passed away in 1916, and the house went to her elder daughter Elena Fyodorovna Sollogub.

The house was well known to Leo Tolstoy. Natalia Mikhailovna's elder sister, Maria Mikhailovna, was the first wife of Mikhail Sergeyevich Sukhotin, who after her death married Tolstoy's eldest daughter, Tatyana Lvovna. Sukhotin's daughter from his first marriage, Natalia Mikhailovna, became the second wife of Prince Nikolai Leonidovich Obolensky, who was married to Tolstoy's middle daughter, Maria Lvovna. Sukhotin's son, Sergey, was the first husband of Tolstoy's granddaughter, Sofia Andreyevna Tolstaya, who later married Sergey Yesenin.

Even before all these family connections, during the time of the Bode barons, Tolstoy attended balls and receptions here. It was this house that he described as the House of the Rostovs in his novel "War and Peace."