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The Grand Hotel Europe's "Historic Floor" |
February, 2007 - The historic building, built in 1824, has undergone meticulous reconstruction, during the course of which however both the art nouveau interiors and the neo-classical facade designed by the celebrated Italian architect Rossi have been preserved.
The hotel building is itself an architectural monument: the premises of the ground floor and first floor are under the protection of the St. Petersburg administration’s committee of state control, utilisation and protection of historical and cultural monuments.
The historic floor houses 35 rooms encompassing the categories of Classic Room, Belle Chambre, Classic Suite and Executive Suite, including the Lidval and Rossi suites. |
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The first floor – Belle Etage - is the building’s main floor, on which are located the state-rooms and halls. The height of their ceilings and unrivalled quality of their décor notably distinguish them from the rooms on the other floors.
The first floor of the Grand Hotel Europe is a truly unique place – there is no such place in any other hotel in the world. This floor runs along the length of Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa, from Nevsky Prospekt to Arts Square. Rooms 101-107 look out onto the square with its monument to Alexander Pushkin and the Russian Museum, whilst rooms 154-159, located on the other end of the floor, face onto historical Nevsky Prospekt.
Over the more than 130-year long history of the hotel, many world-famous guests have gazed out of the ground-floor windows of the Grand Hotel Europe onto the unforgettable views of Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad. Those guests include musicians, writers, artists, ministers and presidents who have stayed here over the years. The list of names is impressive – the president of the United States, Bill Clinton; the president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev; the president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki; Prince Charles; the opera singers Andrea Bocelli and Montserrat Caballé; and rock stars Ian Gillan and Sting. The first floor is reached by a magnificent marble staircase, which echoes with the footfalls of these and many other eminent figures in the spheres of culture, science, sport and politics. Ascending this staircase, guests find themselves opposite the Lidval Room, finished in the 1910s by the outstanding architect Fyodor Lidval.
Corridors with the hotel’s best rooms lead off in different directions from this room, and many of these rooms can justly be called celebratory rooms. In all the first-floor rooms, antique artefacts – paintings, chandeliers, vases, and the stucco work on the ceilings and walls which have been carefully preserved during renovation – invoke in guests the feeling of being a part of history. Furthermore, artefacts from a bygone age are designed to provide additional comfort for guests staying in the first-floor rooms of this historic hotel.
The rooms on the first, ‘historic’ floor, as in all those of the hotel, are equipped with the most up-to-date technical appliances, allowing guests to enjoy their stay in the atmosphere of a bygone age whilst simultaneously using all the latest in technological progress, especially cutting-edge communication such as WiFi Internet access. In 1889-1991 the hotel, which now belongs to Orient Express, underwent reconstruction which has preserved the historic spirit of St. Petersburg’s oldest hotel and made guests’ stay here unforgettable.
Butler Service
The irrefutable advantage of staying on the historic floor is the opportunity to use the services of a personal butler. A butler is a direct link between guests and all the hotel’s services. If a guest wishes to order dinner in their room, purchase theatre tickets or get a shirt laundered, they simply press the button on a special device in their room and the butler will immediately arrive. Whilst showing guests to their room, the butler can tell them about the history of the city and the hotel, about cultural events and nightlife in the city, about the features of the décor and technical facilities of the rooms and about the hotel’s many restaurants. The main task of the butler is to provide maximum comfort for guests. | | |
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