Each building has its own historical story, but the most colorful one in Bīriņi Manor is a small two-story building on the banks of Lake Dzirnezers.
At the time when Count Ludvigs Augusts Mellins lived in the manor, there was a laundry (laundry house) in that place. Around 1814, when the Count was nominated as the head of the Family Registration Audit Commission, he looked for a place to build a meeting house for the commission so that meetings could be held outside Riga, and decided to build it in place of the old laundry. Close to the manor building, but at the same time away, without disturbing family life. Being a friend and benefactor of the peasants, he did not hold the position of head for long.
Then the meeting house turned into the first school-garden, where the children of the manor people spent their days under the supervision of a governess, so that their parents could work on the manor without being disturbed. Sometimes the count himself found a free moment to spend time with the children and teach them German.
It has been heard from people that for a while this building also served as a pub. Then the next heirs of the manor, the Pistohlkorsi, built a new road that wound around the lake to Neibād (Saulkrasti), no longer through the manor yard as before, and the new Saulīškrogs was built on the roadside. So the old pub lost its importance.
But the building continued to live, because it was given to a charming lady, a relative of the Pistohlkors, who had many beautiful fairy tales in her dowry. She lived with her idler, Mrs. Isakova, and a parrot. The children of the lords went there with pleasure. Only they had to be polite and quiet, because since the birthday of their youngest son, the godmother had been deaf and had been reading words from lips. They only had to clearly form sounds.
In turn, during the “Soviet years”, when a sanatorium was set up in the manor buildings, a medical building was created there with mud baths and therapeutic showers in the basement, physiotherapy, a dentist’s office, an X-ray room and a massage room.
Currently, it is the company’s administration building.
What a rich life for one small building!