The New Peterhof Hotel is the first (and now, perhaps, the last) investment project of the Inteko company in St. Petersburg. And although the locals called the construction site nothing but "Baturin", it should be admitted that in Peterhof this developer behaved much more tactfully with respect to the surrounding buildings than, say, in Moscow, for example. Last but not least, he owes this chosen architect - Studio 44 is renowned for its careful approach to heritage.
“For the construction of the hotel, a plot was allocated in the very center of Peterhof, near the entrance to the Upper (parterre) park of the palace and park ensemble,” recalls Nikita Yavein. - Of course, in this zone there are strict regulations regarding the dimensions of newly erected buildings, but not only the security regime was important for us, but also the immediate environment of the future hotel. In particular, in the line of sight - the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul, built in the "Old Russian" style, and the wooden mansions of the former Khrushchev estate on the banks of the old Olgin pond. This situation obliged us to be delicate, and we spent a lot of time trying to find the optimal solution."
The terms of reference ordered the architects to design a hotel with 150 rooms. This is not so much if you decide the hotel as a skyscraper or a couple of "chests" connected by a common stylobate or galleries-passages. However, in the case of Peterhof, such gigantism did not fit categorically, and the architects understood from the very beginning: they had to come up with a fundamentally different structure, fractional and small-scale. Roughly speaking, they should have disassembled one large "box" into several small ones, so that they could then be distributed to the most secluded corners of the existing landscape. However, the authors did not stop there: each of the buildings was given a complex octagonal shape. The resulting cubes with cut corners, on the one hand, are more dynamic and interact more actively with their surroundings, and on the other hand, they are perceived as a modern replica on the theme of the octagonal side-chapels of the adjacent temple.
The architects eventually divided the coveted number of 150 into six - it was this number of buildings that turned out to be ideally "fitted" to the requirements of the already mentioned regulations: the length of each building should not exceed 30 meters, and the height - 12. From the side of the street, all the buildings look like two-storey houses with attics, and their first floors are faced with natural stone, the second - with wood, and the roofs are painted green, as if dissolving the buildings from the surrounding park area. There is also a lot of greenery on the territory of the complex itself, in particular, numerous green ramps lead from the street to the courtyard, prompting the attentive observer that the first floor is actually a common stylobate for all houses.
In it, the architects have collected all the "public" functions of the hotel - the reception area, administrative and office premises, a restaurant, a cafe, a fitness center and a conference hall - and in order to make them sufficiently bright and illuminated, glass cones are placed between the residential buildings light lanterns. And again there is a subtle allusion with the pseudo-Russian style and the pyramids and tents so characteristic of it. Lined up in one straight line, the lanterns emphasize the axis of the inner street of the hotel complex, oriented towards the cathedral. Their bases are painted in the same green color as the roofs of residential buildings, and visually, this even more conceals the dimensions of the building.
The same effect can be achieved by the choice of facade materials. Lined with thin wooden slats, hotel buildings acquire the character of small park buildings. And the fact that these are modern buildings is unambiguously indicated by the numerous dormers, which give the roofs of houses an amusing resemblance to mechanisms, for example, gears.
Hotel "New Peterhof" is an example of not only delicate in relation to monuments, but also environmentally friendly architecture. Partially "buried" in the ground (and it is impossible to guess about the presence of a spacious parking from the street) and landscaped, trimmed with natural stone and wood and rationally using natural light, it meets the standards of "green" construction, which was recently confirmed by the Gold Diploma of the GREEN AWARDS competition … However, although the architects themselves are proud of the fact that they managed to use the most advanced technologies in the project, the main thing is that the hotel exactly repeats the scale of the existing development of Peterhof and was able to breathe new life into the center of this city.
