From 1744 to 1746, Potap Gardenin held the position of head of the Voronezh provincial magistrate. In 1735, he built a stone house for his family in the center of Voronezh, which has survived to this day and is located at Factory Lane, 12. This house is an example of a typical Russian provincial merchant house of the 18th century.

A few years later, Gardenin erected two more buildings: a cloth factory at the corner of the modern streets Stepan Razin and Bolshaya Manezhnaya, which is now part of the local history museum with an exhibition titled "The Patriotic War," and the Tikhvino-Onufrievskaya Church on Factory Lane.

By the end of the 18th century, the Gardenin family went bankrupt. Potap Gardenin's grandson, Nikolai Yakovlevich, sold the factory to the city authorities, and in 1820, the house was sold to the city. This building housed various institutions for a long time, such as a hospital, an orphanage, a charitable institution, and a home for the disabled. Potap Gardenin's constructions are known in scholarly literature as the "Gardenin Historical and Architectural Complex of the 18th Century" and are under state protection as an example of Voronezh's development before 1774.