History

The Astoria was built to a precise deadline. The German-funded company Weiss & Freitag engaged Fyodor Lidval in 1910 with a single purpose: deliver a hotel capable of hosting foreign dignitaries for the three-hundredth anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in May 1913. Construction began in 1911 on the site of a building known as Bristol's furnished rooms; the foundations were reinforced concrete, a rarity in St Petersburg at the time, and the interior was specified as fire-resistant throughout. The hotel opened on 23 December 1912 and received its first wave of imperial guests months later. Lidval's granite cladding, sourced from quarries in the Vyborg region of Finland, gave the building the characteristic warm rust-red tone that still sets it apart along the square.

The hotel's twentieth century was lived at the intersection of Russian history. During the First World War it served as a billet for imperial officers. In February 1917, revolutionary soldiers broke into the building and looted it; thereafter, the new Soviet administration converted it into the First House of the Petrograd Soviet, with rooms monitored by the Cheka. Lenin used it for Moscow stopovers. In 1926 it passed to Intourist management and hosted a stream of foreign visitors including the writer H. G. Wells and the American entrepreneur Armand Hammer. Through the Soviet decades the Astoria functioned as a semi-official reception venue for foreign delegations, its glamour dimmed but never entirely extinguished.

In the early 1990s, following privatisation, Finnish investors undertook a major reconstruction. Rocco Forte Hotels acquired the property in December 1997 and invested a reported $20 million in further restoration, including the adjoining Angleterre Hotel on the same block. The two buildings now operate as a single destination. Despite these transformations, the exterior Lidval designed in 1911 remains largely intact and the Astoria is listed among the architectural monuments of St Petersburg.