Grand Hotel Europe

The Grand Hotel Europe stands on Nevsky Prospect in Saint Petersburg, its current building substantially the result of a renovation completed in 1875 credited to the architect Ludwig Fontana, working within a site that had housed a hotel since earlier in the nineteenth century. Its eclectic historicist facade and richly ornamented interiors, including a stained-glass-domed dining hall, reflect the fashionable European hotel architecture of Imperial Russia's late nineteenth-century commercial boom. The hotel operated under state control through most of the Soviet period, its grand public rooms repurposed for institutional use, before a major restoration in 1991 returned it to luxury hotel operation as the Soviet Union dissolved. Long one of the most prominent hotels in Russia, it has hosted a range of European and Russian dignitaries and remains a prominent architectural landmark along Nevsky Prospect, the city's principal historic avenue.