Looks like a problem with this Porsche....
Who are these guys spreadeagled over a car, asks the gal? Sure makes a difference from the usual pictures of hotel limos, but sorry, this car is not just any old limo. It is a Porsche Panamera, just like the one that can pick you up from St Petersburg airport and whisk you to W St Petersburg.
Just heard, incidentally, that St Petersburg is working on a 25-year management contract for the airport with Fraport, operators of Frankfurt airport. This should speed things up.
But no worry, it is an illustration in Porsche Panamera, one of the books above the working fire in the lobby of W St Petersburg
(The same source says to avoid having to get the cumbersome visa required by many nationalities to enter Russia, come in by ferry, from Estonia, Finland or Sweden, and you can stay in Russia for 72 hours without a visa.) Anyway, I am here, with a visa, and staying at W St Petersburg.
The ever-thoughtful GM Peter Katusak-Huzsvar has done a deal with Taschen and it seems all their books are scattered around somewhere or other.
Simple salad at the lobby bar counter
There is also another mega book, published by Delius Klasing. This is called Porsche Panamera and one of Frank Orel’s brilliant photos is – well this, enthusiasts over the car bonnet.
We were looking at the book as we lunched in the bar, up at its café counter. Alain Ducasse’s MiX restaurant, with its three slightly-different eating venues, was superb at dinner and breakfast but we wanted something fast.
Looking across at Four Seasons Hotel Lion Palace
A club sandwich sensibly came as four individual sandwiches, crusts off and held with decorative toothpicks. A Greek salad came with Russian bread – how international can one get? The Italian La Cimbali coffee machine prides itself on being best for Italian lifestyle…
As we sat at lunch we looked across at what will be Four Seasons Hotel Lion Palace St Petersburg (journalists are not going to like that name, it takes up so many precious ‘words’!). The hotel is now set for opening, says its ultra-tall GM, Martin Rhomberg, on October 15th, 2012.
Looking up at a section of the Four Seasons' lobby ceiling, gilded with 18-carat gold (the chandelier is still dust-sheet covered)
The bedrooms are mostly ready, as is the splendid Winter Garden conservatory in the glassed-over central courtyard. The problem is utilities, sticking pipes through four-feet walls that go back to 1824, when it was built as the Lion Palace.
Rhomberg coducted a lightning after lunch tour. The main entrance has been restored to its original glory – you sweep up 38 ten-foot wide marble stairs from the main hall, the walls filled with cartouches of war exploits and, overhead, enough 18-carat gold-leaf highlighting to keep even that king of bling P-Diddy happy.
Looking up at the Presidential Suite's terrace roof
Loved the Pan-Asian restaurant, a SPIN design with hundreds of baseball-bat shaped lights hanging down. The 183 bedrooms are cool (they are designed by Cheryl Rowley, who has used palest duck egg blue for walls, and perfectly blended champagne-hued sheets with matching real leather headboards).
The Presidential Suite is going to wow everyone, from P-Diddy to Putin. It has a 2,000kg bathtub sculpted from one block of flecked marble, and an outside terrace, with original 40-ft columns, that gives views soaring over Alexandrovsky Gardens opposite.
A W Hotel Panamera was ready to leave
Oh yes, the luxury hotel will have a four-floor wellness block, and a smoking bar, the Alexander – named after the assassinated Tsar Alexander II, he of the gardens opposite – that has walls completely formed of heavily knotted walnut veneer and a two-way real-log working fireplace.
Enough. Back at W St Petersburg it was time to show loyalty to the Porsche Panamera, and off we purred.
With a backdrop of St Isaac's Cathedral, this is the rooftop Terrace of W St Petersburg that opens tonight
Tonight, Saturday May 19th, 2012, lifestyle comes out in St Petersburg Russia. This is the grand opening of the rooftop terrace on the eight-floor W St Petersburg, and the gal had a preview.
Up there in the glorious sunlight, she leaned against the glass retaining wall. Behind her was the long-awaited, and sadly still awaited, Four Seasons Lion Palace St Petersburg (was it really going to launch a Fabergé brand at one time? – the name is now owned by the South African global mining giant Pallinghurst).
Behind that was the gilded dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral. Now, for the next few months, the great and good of St Petersburg will wine and shine up there, showing off and having the same kind of looking-down-at-the-rest-of-the-world feeling that you experience in Moscow at 02, atop Ritz-Carlton Moscow.
Flavoured water, and a suitably-fashionable poster, in the hotel lobby
Cocktails for this summer bar venue have been specially designed by a sommelier from Hotel Plaza-Athenée in Paris. Try his Flower Bubble, a Martini glass filled with Veuve-Clicquot champagne and a table tennis ball-sized ice ball in which are frozen edible flowers.
Lifestyle up on the roof. There is lots of it already inside the 137-room luxury hotel. Follow the flow of the lobby. From the front door turn left to a sitting area with low-low bright-coloured sofas and chairs. The central wall is a dry aquarium, filled with heated acrylic fish (by Jacopo Foggini) suspended from the ceiling above.
Flow on around past the end wall – working fireplace, what looks like the entire library of Taschen art publishers, and a coffee stall – past front desk, with a backdrop of all-wall acrylic net (two layers, more Foggini) and on to the restaurants.
Open kitchen at the back of the three Alain Ducasse MiX restaurants
The entire food product here is Alain Ducasse, from the casual-fine dining to employee cafeteria (lucky them), and room service, too. The main restaurant, MiX, is three-part. The front section, by Voznesenskiy Street – looking across to the Four Seasons – is light-bright, the middle area has a glass wall formed of horizontal wine bottles, the rear part, dominated by a horizontally-bunched gold-plated net curtain that is in fact an Italian designer-chandelier, by Terzani Atlantis, looks into an open Molteni kitchen.
Asparagus with fresh morels, Alain Ducasse at MiX
Alain Ducasse has put three of his own team in here, and you can be sure the food is good. Asparagus looked pretty, tasted a delight and its additional sabayon was addictive. The English-language local paper, St Petersburg Times, raved about his organic chicken main course, cooked Pojarski style – ground, bound with cream and egg, breaded and fried in a manner popularized by Tsar Nicholas I’s chef.
Some dishes are marked in tribute to Ducasse’s eponymous restaurant in the Hotel Plaza-Athenée Paris, celebrating its 25th birthday this year. Servers glide back and forth, the girls (everyone is a beauty here) in frocks specially designed in Lebanon.
A silver ball in the gym
The boss of the whole hotel, Hungarian Peter Katusak-Huzsvar, takes personal pride in design everywhere. Although Antonio Citterio – he who has done the Bulgari hotels in Milan, Bali and now, just opened, London – is the designer here (he was brought in by the owner, who had stayed in Bulgari Milan), Katusak-Huzsvar has added little touches, like the bowl of green apples in the gym. And the gym, by the way, stays open 24 hours, so you can jog the Citterio-designed Technogym treadmill after hitting the Flower Bubbles up on the roof.
And a gold disco ball, a Terzani Orten'zia Very Very Gold, over the bed
Citterio’s bedroom designs have lifestyle elements not normally on the luxury travel circuit. At the top of the wall above the windows is a full-width, 12-inch tall angled mirror, enabling you quite cleverly to see yourself when lying in bed. Hanging over you is a disco ball, Terzani Orten’zia Very Very Gold. Different.
Also different is the night turndown. Forget chocolates. You get a white mat by the bedside (marked Why Barefoot) and a kaleidoscope, neither of which should be taken home.
Petra, the Matryoshka doll, on a reflecting mirrored table
You get a post-it on the bathroom mirror, next to the in-mirror television, reminding you of a $200 fine if you smoke. And, to take home, you get your own stylish ‘babushka’ doll. The technical name for a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size is actually a Matryoshka doll, apparently invented by a folk painter at Abramtsevo, Sergey Malyutin, in 1890 (wow, that was after the opening of Russia’s oldest luxury hotel, Grand Hotel Europe, vintage 1875).
Traditionally the outer layer is a woman in a sarafan, the long-shapeless traditional Russian peasant dress. Figures inside can be identical, or even male… Here all five figures are charmingly gold and duck-egg blue. This Matryoskhka is hereby named Petra, for the city of its home, and it is a souvenir of that city’s youngest (as of now) luxury hotel.
Pushkin statue in Arts Square, at end of Grand Hotel Europe, St Petersburg
St Petersburg is a living testimony to so many great names of the past, including Moscow-born Alexander Pushkin, killed in 1837, aged 37, in his 30th duel (his French opponent had been trying to seduce Mrs Pushkin).
Room 112 of Grand Hotel Europe is themed for a local boy, Carl Fabergé 1846-1920. Known as the Fabergé Suite – one of the luxury hotel’s several such ‘historic suites’, all of which come with butlers if you want them – it is pale and elegant, with light parquet floors set with oriental rugs, and palest pink and gold wallpaper.
There are two 15-inch high gold sculptures of Fabergé eggs in one cabinet, and a selection of suitable books in another. A portrait of Fabergé graces one wall, near photos of his showroom. The gal learns something every day…
Painting of a giant Fabergé egg, in 112, the Fabergé Suite, Grand Hotel Europe, St Petersburg
Orient-Express as a group loves the arts. La Samanna on St Martin has a resident artist, and another sibling hotel, La Residencia on Mallorca has not only a resident artist but a resident sculptor. Many of its hotels have tutored art programmes. Stay home, in the Fabergé Suite, and do a PhD on Fabergé.
Live off the fruit bowl and room service, and your private bar, hidden in a closet, offers not only espresso and a range of teas but there is a filled wine fridge as well as a minibar. Think back to who stayed here, at what is now a Leading hotel, in the past.
Tchaikovsky honeymooned here in 1877, although actually this is not a good recommendation for this luxury hotel (‘She is loathsome to me in every sense of this word’, he wrote to his brother about his wife, and the marriage broke up very quickly). Johann Strauss stayed here. Regulars today include minor European royalty and major Russian oligarchs.
General view of the world-class breakfast theatre
Last time here, I saw the same guy every day at breakfast. He was a skinny oligarch, big in gas (Gazprom is headquartered in St Petersburg). His breakfast was monotonous. A plate of watermelon, big glasses of beetroot juice, and of smetana sour cream. Follow this with salad, then cheese.
Breakfast, in L’Europe from seven every morning, is one of the Seven Culinary Wonders of the World. First, the room, the size of three double-width squash courts end to end. The ceiling soars up to architect Lidval’s Art Nouveau clear-storey stained glass. At the far end is more stained glass behind a stage where an unsmiling pianist plays, brilliantly.
Serving tables metaphorically groan under the array of juices, including beetroot, and a range of pouring yoghurts. I have a bowl of strawberries, and a whole banana. A man near me goes for hard boiled egg halves topped with salmon roe, others choose Danish that look like fried eggs, sunny-side up (or have the real thing, bespoke from the egg chef).
Breakfast cook, in front of the pianist, in front of one of the stained glass windows
The bread table had dill-flavoured rolls, and bacon-studded rolls, and slice your own loaves that includes a pumpernickel, a reminder of the black breads of times past. The coffee is at least as good as anything Starbuck’s could offer – it is blended and roasted here in St Petersburg, especially for this 301-room hotel.
Not so long ago there was another coffee awakening, at LUX* Belle Mare on Mauritius, the lifestyle luxury hotel that has turned its old front desk into a coffee station, and what was the back office, behind it, into a coffee roasting office, producing the most addictive aromas. There is yesterday’s Financial Times to read (too early, for today’s), plus today’s satellited International Herald Tribune, and the amazingly outspoken St Petersburg Times. Finish those, and on to looking through the hotel’s little check-in booklet.
Super-Oz GM, Leon Larkin, who wears a name tag so that everyone knows who he is, personally introduces the booklet, inviting you to love the hotel as much as he does. The booklet not only gives details and opening hours of all the restaurants but also explains that the door keys show one of ten full-colour Palekh fairytales – Palekh is the type of miniature art found on lacquerwork and it is named for Palekh village in Ivanovo Oblast.
Looking up, to yet more stained glass, L'Europe breakfast room
At least half the breakfasters are locals (they know a good thing when they see it). Sunday brunch – the only one in town that works, says a knowledgeable gourmet – is nearly all locals.
Any day, for those staying overnight, they also appreciate lots of good things, like showers and free WiFi that are easy-work, and a really comfortable bed, and when you get into it at night you find not only the usual order form for tomorrow’s breakfast (how COULD anyone not go to the restaurant?) but also weather for the next five days, the opportunity to order a satellited New York Times or whatever, and a quotation, say Jean Paul Richter’s ‘the secret of contentment is the realization that life is a gift not a right’).
Having suggested I could do with more electric sockets, an antique-looking box has miraculously appeared, with European and US sockets within (who IS this genius who runs this place?).
Hotel keys are cards showing Palekh art, as on lacquer work
So, might as well make the most of that gift. Soon I will be on the train to Moscow, which makes me think of trains. Orient-Express is taking its famous Venice Simplon-Orient-Express (VSOE) for its first-ever journey to Stockholm near year. The trip is April 8-14, 2013, Venice to Venice via Denmark and several countries in between.
There are overnights in Copenhagen both ways – sadly, Hotel d’Angleterre, currently being completely redone, will not be open in time. A quick home-made beetroot spaghetti with fresh vegetable bits for lunch, and I am on my way. The girl behind the desk gives me a farewell phial, a spray of the hotel’s 1875-named room aroma.
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