Mykola took the left-over building materials from the house and designed and built a jungle gym for his son. It's across the pond that he created by damming up a stream that ran through his property. This is a piece of land that he bought after he started building the house. Originally the spot was used as a dump by the village residents. He cleaned it up and hauled our the garbage. Old habits die hard. Some villagers kept using the area as a trash dump. He cleaned it out again and put a fence around it. Once he built the playground for his son and a house for his groundskeeper the dumping stopped. Mykola had priced out the cost of a slide for the jungle gym. It was pricey, so he used a piece of plastic instead. My daughters checked it out and gave the whole set-up a big thumbs up.
A big piece of the side yard between the main house an the stream is handed over to a lawn. Mykola set up a table for the kids to have dinner as a picnic while the two of us ate dinner on the front patio. We could see the kids, but they were able to run around and play. In addition to a part-time governess/house keeper, and the groundskeeper, Mykola hired a driver/fixer to helps with the cooking and running the house. The evening that I was there, the driver/fixer kept an eye on the kids after the governess left, then gave us a ride back to our apartment in the center of Kyiv.
The cabana is really an outdoor kitchen. It has a charcoal or wood grill and a gas range with several burners. The blue roof matches all the other buildings on the property. It is large enough to fit a table full of adults. The walkway goes from the cabana directly to the dining room and second kitchen on the ground floor.
Mykola set up this large room for entertaining. It is clearly a substitute for either going to a restaurant or for getting guests into the private areas of the house. The table was set for 10, but you could easily add tables and chairs to get almost twice that number. He put a sink with soap at the door. It reminded me of the Soviet cafeterias of the 90s (but there was never any soap nor paper towels). Later I saw the same sort of set-up at the swanky Columbus Circle Whole Foods grocery store in Manhattan. 
Mykola put more built in bookshelves on the ground floor. He filled them with photos and objects from his archives. He works from home so I understand why he's put so much effort into decorating. It is an edited collection. Very different from the crammed shelves of apartments that I used to visit where the стінка was jammed with an entire family's books, mementos and bedding -- all in the living room.
Every house has a storage room. Perhaps the biggest indicator of the development of a middle-class in Ukraine is the emergence of stuff. Back in the day you didn't have anywhere to put your stuff. Also you were not like to have much stuff. It could be contained in your all-purpose stinka. Now, you can see stuff, buy stuff, and get stuff. That means to need to store it as well. Mykola built himself a wine cellar that has two alcoves. One is full of racks for bottles. The other side is a скад with, as he described it, the stuff that collects and is usually underfoot. He wanted a place for it, so he built it.
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