This is the ultimate 'wedding cake', 1957 style
Radisson Royal Hotel Moscow is, quite honestly, one of the world’s most extraordinary luxury hotels – and on 2 September, 2011, World Travel Awards’ energetic founder Graham Cooke deemed it, on behalf of travel agents globally, ‘Europe’s Leading Luxury Business Hotel’. I must admit when I stayed there it blew my mind away.
OK, so it is a typical 1957 ‘Soviet wedding cake’ building, designed by the Architectural Studio of the Ministry of Construction in the USSR in the form of architects A Mordvinov, V Kalish, P Krasilnikov, V Oltarzhevsky, as a 34-floor hotel with 1,017 bedrooms.
GM Wolfgang Nitschke with one of the thousands of genuine artworks
It reopened on 28 April 2010 as a 505-room hotel, with additional apartments. The new owners, who include Telman Ishmailov (owner of the Mardan Palace in Antalya) have spent, well, a billionaire-type fortune.
The interior has acres of polished marble, there are over 1,000 original Socialist Realism artworks, the library has 3,000 books, there is a 35-ft diameter three-dimensional diorama of Moscow and so on… The basement fitness has the world’s largest, and modern, Technogym (all Citterio design) and a 150-foot, five-lane pool with blue neon lights overhead.
Outside, on the Moskva River, the hotel has five, 200-seat year-round river boats. Hungry? Well, there are masses of in-hotel restaurants, some run by restaurateur Arkady Novikov.
The Club Lounge breakfast is a feast for caviar-holics
My room, 1061, looked across the river to the Mayor’s office. I loved the thick drapes, the Mühldorfer bed, the bathroom’s heated floor and towel rails, and everything possible is most-expensive Frette (and WiFi is free).
I also loved the 11th floor Club lounge, open 24 hours: servers there wear 1920s-type black and white tweenies uniform and breakfast is spectacular. This luxury hotel works, and it is really businesslike.
