Favourable investment conditions and seasonal high demand have seen nearly 500 mini-hotels opened in St Petersburg over the last decade. Philip Parker chooses the best among them.
Europe’s fourth largest city by population, St Petersburg is currently going through a period of rejuvenation after decades of neglect. The 300th anniversary of the city’s founding in 2003 brought a huge amount of international attention – as well as much-needed spending on infrastructure and culture – which has been sustained through the hosting of the G8 summit in July 2006 and onwards.
In the 1990s St Petersburg became known throughout Russia as the country’s “Bandit Capital”, but in the last decade the city and the surrounding Leningrad Oblast have become models for the rest of Russia’s regions, attracting massive foreign investment and sustained economic growth through active public relations and intelligent tax-breaks.
International carmakers are at the forefront of the growth in foreign direct investment, which has stood at over 40 per cent for the last two years. Toyota opened its first Russian plant in the city in December, and Nissan and General Motors are planning to follow suit in the next couple of years. Ford already produces 72,000 units per year at its Leningrad Oblast plant, and the city has become known as “the Russian Detroit”.
International software companies also find the city’s highly educated workforce a draw, with Intel, Motorola, and Sun Microsystems all running research and development centres there. Several of Russia’s most important companies have also been encouraged to move north, with fuel giant Gazprom and Russia’s biggest carmaker, AvtoVAZ, both transferring major parts of their operation to St Petersburg in the last few years. This tendency, and the raising of the city’s profile in general, has been abetted by fact that Vladimir Putin, a Leningrad native, promotes the city’s interests wherever possible. It now seems clear that his successor will do the same.
St Petersburg’s renewed affluence and importance is evident on the streets, both in the ongoing restoration of the city centre, a Unesco World Heritage Site, and in a number of major development projects. These include the expansion of the Mariinsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet, which opened a new concert hall in December 2006 and is building a second (opening in 2010), and the Norman Foster-designed redevelopment of the 18th-century New Holland shipyards as a cultural and trade centre.
More controversially, Gazprom’s planned headquarters, the proposed 396-metre Okhta Tower, seen by some as the ultimate symbol of the city’s new prosperity and significance, is likely to go ahead despite fierce opposition from many locals and mutterings from Unesco that it will affect the city’s status.
St Petersburg is a city with a surplus of character. The city on the Neva has a unique combination of grandeur and decay, cultural snobbery and genteel poverty. Although only three centuries old, it has built up a wealth of myth and legend, both thanks to its intensive literary mapping by Russia’s greatest writers and to its dramatic history, from its fraught founding by Peter the Great to the 900-day Siege of Leningrad.
This unique legacy, combined with the city’s growing status as a major business centre (see next page), is making St Petersburg a more attractive and comfortable destination for business and leisure travellers unperturbed by a lack of cheap flights and the strict visa regulations. International hotel chains are responding, and 2008 will see the opening of several large new luxury properties in the centre.
As has always been the case, however, St Petersburg’s pomp and luxury are only skin-deep. The city’s majestic avenues and palatial façades are being returned to their former glory, but a warren of shabby courtyards and narrow staircases are still redolent of the city’s past. This world of student garrets, artists’ studios and Soviet communal flats has proved a fertile breeding ground for great art, from the downtrodden heroes of Dostoevsky and Gogol to the dour charms of Soviet underground rock, and is as appealing to many visitors as the Imperial splendour of the Hermitage and the grand palaces at Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo.
Large luxury hotels are ill-equipped to give their guests a taste of this side of the city. Fortunately, however, for travellers who want to explore the private life of the city, St Petersburg has developed a huge network of “mini-hotels”, the best of which offer top levels of comfort and services combined with individual character and a real sense of history.
Now numbering over 500, the vast majority of which have opened in the last four years, mini-hotels are a response both to the lack of hotel space in St Petersburg and to the difficulties of finding suitable uses for the historic buildings in the city centre, many of which were carved up into communal flats in the early years of the Soviet Union and then left to rot. While property developers found it more profitable to concentrate on building new apartment blocks on the outskirts of town, a few entrepreneurs took advantage of low real estate prices and eased building regulations to create a new breed of small, inexpensive private hotel.
One of the finest examples, Casa Leto, is a good illustration of the trend. Opened in 2003 by Adriano Leto, an Anglo-Italian filmmaker and designer, and his Russian wife Tatiana, this charming five-room hotel occupies a former communal flat on Bolshaya Morskaya Street, just around the corner from St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Hotel Astoria. “There was an opportunity to do something different in the hotel area at a time when the investment was quite low in St Petersburg,” explains Adriano. “If it all went wrong we could have converted the property into a luxury apartment and walked away without much loss.”
Thanks to the couple’s determination to create a hotel “that really looked after foreign visitors and helped them feel comfortable in an alien place”, guests at Casa Leto will feel as if they are staying with friends, albeit friends with impeccable taste, plenty of cash, and an in-depth knowledge of their city.
The beautifully designed rooms have combined the building’s high ceilings and stucco decorations with a contemporary minimalism and quirkiness – the lamps created from old brass samovars are a particular delight. The English-speaking staff are incredibly helpful, and ready to organise anything from essential business services to homestays in a traditional dacha and mushroom-picking tours (very popular, apparently, with Japanese guests).
The hotel deserves particular praise for the fact that not only wifi access but also international telephone calls are among the complimentary services, a rare luxury in the city. Unsurprisingly, Casa Leto has had a huge amount of press attention, and bookings need to be made well in advance, especially for the peak White Nights season. There are plans to expand the hotel within the same building in the near future.
Alexander House, which has a reputation and atmosphere to rival Casa Leto, is another mini-hotel which has proved successful enough to expand. Occupying a charming early 19th-century mansion on the Kryukov Canal, a few minutes’ walk from the Mariisnky Theatre, the hotel was opened, also in 2003, by Alexander Zhukov, a journalist and media entrepreneur who fell into the hotel business when working in Afghanistan in 2001. There he opened a temporary guesthouse for fellow journalists and aid-workers, and this eventually gave him the capital to buy out the residents of this historic building’s communal flats and turn it into a unique boutique hotel.
The 14 rooms, designed by Zhukov’s wife Natalia, are each named after a great city of the world, the character of which is subtly reflected in the choice of furniture and fittings, including artworks picked up by the couple on their travels and a number of features created by the hotel’s own carpenter. Like Casa Leto, Alexander House manages to combine a homely feeling, enhanced by friendly staff and charming public spaces like the cozy, well-stocked library with open fire, with genuinely high standards of services and amenities.
Thanks to the immense popularity of the hotel, both with foreign visitors and with Russia’s cultural elite, Zhukov opened a second property in St. Petersburg in November 2006. Called Alexander House Inspiration – the older property is now Alexander House Old City – the new hotel has 12 rooms and is located across the river on the Petrograd Side, one of the most fashionable areas of the city, notable for its superb Style Moderne architecture. The interiors reflect the area’s character, with simple fin de siècle elegance and large Matisse reproductions in the public areas.
The success of these two pioneering hotels has inspired scores of imitators. One of the best is the Rachmaninov Antique Hotel, which has a superb location just off Nevsky Prospekt and right next to the Kazan Cathedral. Opened in 2003 as Kazansky 5 Mini-Hotel, it originally offered fairly basic accommodation, but has since been expanded to 26 rooms and renovated to a very high standard. The hotel’s name honours the fact that part of the premises once belonged to Sergei Rachmaninov’s aunt and the composer lived here while he was studying at the St Petersburg Conservatory, and that the hotel features some fine 19th-century antiques – at least one piece in each room. Some of the rooms are a little cramped, but the hotel does manage to combine traditional elegance with a laid-back atmosphere. The owners also run two nearby galleries, and the walls of the hotel are covered with some great 20th-century photography. The friendly, English-speaking staff and the free wifi also show that the owners are in touch with the needs of their guests.
Another mini-hotel with a great location is the Ermitage Hotel on Millionnaya Ulitsa, less than five minutes’ from Palace Square and the Winter Palace. Comprising only four rooms in a house that once belonged to the Princes Gagarin, the hotel is very elegant, with dark wood panelling throughout. Rich in history and imposingly decorated, the Ermitage Hotel can be booked in its entirety, giving you the equivalent of a luxury townhouse in the very centre of St Petersburg.
Finally, although it can hardly be considered a mini-hotel, it would be impossible not to mention the Taleon Imperial Hotel, formerly the Eliseev Palace Hotel, which was founded in much the same way, and is one of the most luxurious hotels in the city. A labour of love for Georgian-born businessman Alexander Yebralidze, who made his money as a trader and property developer in the early Nineties, the hotel occupies a Neoclassical palace on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika River which was once the family home of the Eliseevs, one of Tsarist Russia’s greatest merchant families.
It took ten years to restore the building, which had been turned into a House of Arts during the Soviet Union, and the results are spectacular. Many of the original interiors have been carefully restored, and the 29 rooms are all sumptuously luxurious. Part of the building is given over to a very exclusive private members club, so this small hotel can afford to offer a full range of five-star services, including one of the best gyms in the city and a top-class spa. The hotel’s casino is particularly stunning, with exquisite stucco wall decorations and four-metre Baccarat crystal standard lamps, beneath a massive Socialist Realist ceiling mural depicting downtrodden workers and peasants uniting in glorious revolution.
The first Russian hotel to become a member of the Leading Small Hotels of the World, the Taleon Imperial is now expanding into the neighbouring building on Nevsky Prospekt, and new rooms will be rolled out from May this year. The company also last year opened the Sheremetev Palace Taleon Residence, an extraordinary project which completely resurrected the home of the Counts Sheremetev, burned to the ground in 1993.
On the banks of the Neva River, looking out onto the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Cruiser Aurora, the Residence, which can only be rented as a whole, offers seven apartments, plus superb banqueting and conferencing facilities, as well as a spa and fitness centre, all carefully fitted into reconstructions of the palace’s original 19th-century interiors.
As with the other properties mentioned here, it would seem that private entrepreneurs, especially hoteliers, are finding more fitting uses for St Petersburg’s historic buildings, and showing more respect for the city’s heritage, than the cash-strapped and still corrupt local authorities can hope to manage.
Contacts
Casa Leto Private Hotel
34 Bolshaya Morskaya
tel +7 812 314 6622
casaleto.com
Rooms from E155
Alexander House Old City
27 Kryukov Canal Embankment
tel +7 812 575 3877
a-house.ru
Rooms from E150
Alexander House Inspiration
14a Bolshaya Monetnaya
tel +7 812 575 3877
a-house.ru
Rooms from E150
Rachmaninov Antique Hotel
5 Kazanskaya
tel +7 812 571 7618
hotelrachmaninov.com
Rooms from 2,850RUR
Ermitage Hotel
11 Millionnaya
tel +7 812 571 5497
ermitage.spb.ru
Rooms from 3,900RUR
Taleon Imperial Hotel
59 Moika River Embankment
tel +7 812 324 9911
taleonimperialhotel.com
Rooms from 1,7000RUR
Tried & tested: Kempinski Moika 22
WHAT’S IT LIKE? Opened in 2005, the Kempinski Moika 22 occupies an unbeatable location just across from the Hermitage. Although hardly a “mini” hotel, it is small by Kempinski’s standards and has the intimate feel of a boutique property. The décor is a tasteful adaptation of the Russian Imperial style with a nod to the cleaner lines of modernity, which makes a welcome change from the Tsarist bling favoured by many of the five-star chains. This is particularly true of the public spaces, which are among the hotel’s greatest assets – its combination of luxury, intimacy and security has made it a favourite with local businessmen.
WHERE IS IT? Next to Palace Square, on the Moika canal.
HOW MANY ROOMS? 197, including 23 suites (five Executive Suites).
ROOM FACILITIES Appropriately for a canalside hotel, the décor in all the rooms and most of the suites is “marine style” – an elegant combination of warm wood, French navy and white, with sailing pictures on the walls. (The higher-end suites have a more luxurious colour scheme, and are furnished with beautiful antique pieces and artworks.) The beds are very comfortable, with a selection of different-weight goosedown pillows, and all rooms come with LCD TV, minibar, safe, workdesk, hairdryer, bathrobe and slippers. Bathrooms are equipped with marble fittings, underfloor heating and Kempinski own-brand toiletries; and Superior rooms and above also have separate bath and shower. Free wifi is available throughout the hotel, as well as wired broadband in the rooms.
RESTAURANTS AND BARS Located on the ground floor at the back of the lobby, the Beau Rivage restaurant offers French fine dining in the evening, and is also the venue for breakfast (7-11am). A lighter menu is served at the Bellevue Brasserie on the ninth floor (open noon to 1am), which lives up to its name with stunning views across the rooftops from its floor-to-ceiling windows. Back on the ground floor, the Von Witte Bar is open for drinks and light snacks all day (8am-1am), and is a cosy space with plenty of brown leather, exposed brickwork and open fires. It is on the right of the entrance, and is matched on the other side by the elegant Tea Room, where a bubbling samovar and English sandwiches provide a relaxed venue for afternoon meetings (3-6pm). Another corporate favourite is the tiny Wine Cellar beneath the lobby, which is equipped with wooden tables and a wall of wine racks and is perfect for smaller events. It is open to guests from 6-11pm (closed Sunday and Monday).
MEETING AND BUSINESS FACILITIES For larger meetings and conferences, there are two options: the Neva Room (205 sqm, 200 theatre-style) on the ground floor at the rear of the hotel, and the Atrium Foyer (250 sqm) on the level above. In addition, the Fontanka Room can be used for smaller meetings (18 boardroom-style) or as a break-out area for the Neva Room.
LEISURE FACILITIES A small Relaxation Centre is located on the ninth floor, and features a sauna, Turkish steam bath and a beautiful blue-tiled spa bath. The fitness facilities include three cardiovascular machines and an exercise area, but sadly no TV or natural light.
VERDICT A charming hotel which combines comfort with character, the Moika is ideal for business travellers who want a central location and somewhere to entertain colleagues and clients.
PRICE Internet rates for a mid-week stay in February started from E200 for a Business room (24-hour cancellation).
CONTACT Kempinski Moika 22, Moika River Embankment 22, St Petersburg; tel +7 812 335 9111; kempinski.com.
INTERNATIONAL HOTEL UPDATE
Although mini-hotels have done much to ease the strain, 2008 looks set to be the year when hotel chains will really make a difference to the shortage of rooms in St Petersburg. First up, the recently opened Holiday Club St Petersburg which brought a new concept, the five-star spa hotel, to the city. Holiday Club’s second property outside the chain’s native Finland, the 278-room hotel just across Palace Bridge from the Hermitage offers the best spa facilities in the city and 29 timeshare apartments. The hotel plans to bring a more contemporary, relaxed style of luxury to the city with its Stress Free Area well-being designs.
Also promising to bring big innovations to the city’s luxury market, Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide is set to open the W St Petersburg before the end of the year, the first property under the company’s new lifestyle brand to be opened in Eastern Europe. The W will be next to St Isaac’s Cathedral, and the Rocco Forte Astoria and Angleterre Hotels, in the heart of the city. It promises 135 rooms with cutting-edge styling and a roof-top bar with superb views over the downtown.
S-group, the Finnish company behind Holiday Club, is also bringing two of its Sokos four-star business hotels to St Petersburg. Finland’s largest hotel chain, Sokos offers modern business-class accommodation and a high standard of conferencing facilities at 37 properties in Finland and one in Tallinn. The Sokos Hotel Olympic Garden, opening in March, will have 348 rooms in the southern centre of St Petersburg, convenient for Pulkovo airport and the city’s commercial heart. The Sokos Hotel Vasilievsky, opening two months later, will offer 225 rooms in the city’s oldest district, historic Vasilievsky Island.
Getting its foot in the door a little earlier, Accor, which already manages the stylish Novotel, has started welcoming guests to its 221-room St Petersburg Ibis Moskovsky Vokzal, built next to the city’s main station on the site that was planned to be the terminal for the express St Petersburg-Moscow rail-link. The first international economy chain to open in Russia, the Ibis aims to set the standard for low-cost hotels in the city. Accor and its Russian partners Kesko have plans to open a further 14 hotels over the next five years.
Finally, the Corinthia Nevskij Palace, one of the city’s most popular five-star hotels, is set to become the largest in the city when its long-awaited expansion plan is completed at the end of the year. Although it has run into delays, the programme will eventually give the 390-room hotel the most extensive luxury conference facilities in the city, with space for up to 1,000 delegates.
Lucy Fitzgeorge-Parker
