Why do I loose ping after adding static route

Since I live in one of the countries with most freedom ever been presented to citizens, I'm using a VPN all the time to connect to free world. Well, this way my connection gets slower but as I grow older and older behind my desktop, I can surf the net.

But I ssh into our company server almost all the time and it does not need to go through VPN so I'm trying to handle this with a static route. I want all the traffic to go through the VPN except for a single IP address.

I try it like this:

$ sudo ip route add x.x.x.x dev wlan0

But after that, I no longer can ping the server:

$ ping x.x.x.x                          
PING x.x.x.x 56(84) bytes of data.
From SAM-ThinkPad-E450 (192.168.1.103) icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable
From SAM-ThinkPad-E450 (192.168.1.103) icmp_seq=2 Destination Host Unreachable
From SAM-ThinkPad-E450 (192.168.1.103) icmp_seq=3 Destination Host Unreachable