Inside A Gentleman in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel

A Gentleman In Moscow, based on Amor Towles’ 2016 novel of the same name, tells the story of deposed Russian nobleman Count Alexander Rostov (Ewan McGregor), who is sentenced to life under “house arrest” in a barren attic room of the Hotel Metropol Moscow following the 1917-1923 Bolshevik Revolution.

Aside from Amor’s colourful descriptions of the labyrinth of rooms in the hotel, production designer Víctor Molero and set decorator Ussal Smithers had the real-life Hotel Metropol Moscow to draw on for inspiration. The hotel, which has been in operation since 1907, currently has 365 guest rooms (each originally designed around a different theme), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg – thanks to the hotel’s eclectic collection of architectural styles, labyrinth of rooms and corridors, banqueting halls, and basement service areas that allowed it to take care of guests’ every whim on site, the building was nicknamed the Tower of Babel.

And while Count Rostov is supposed to live out his life in just one desolate room, we soon get to discover a lot more about the world of the Metropol as the series takes us from 1918 to the 1950s, through revolution, two world wars and a cold war.

Stream A Gentleman in Moscow S1 on Showmax. New episodes Mondays from 20:30.

Frozen in time

The Metropol, even after the Revolution, seemed frozen at the time of the Count’s heyday, with its ornate blend of Art Nouveau and Russian Imperial-style gilded foyers, plush red velvet and gilded wood furniture, and a massive three-storey-high dining room under a stained glass dome, which was originally designed as a theatre with capacity for 3 000 viewers.

In 1931, one American visitor commented that even the staff didn’t seem to change, and that the same lift operator, in the same uniform, was in service during the 20 years during which she visited the hotel. The Metropol, with its liveried staff and extravagant dining service with imperial silver tea sets and dinnerware, formed a stark contrast to the grey and austere Moscow outside its doors. Yes, the Bolshoi theatre was just across the way, but the notorious Lubyanka prison was just down the street, too.

Rubbished by the revolution

During the Revolution years in the early 1920s, the Metropol took a pounding, and not just from military shelling that shattered every window. With service practically non-existent, one Russian official reported seeing filth everywhere, from dirt and cigarette butts littering the floors, to long-term residents clogging their sinks and toilets with rubbish, chopping furniture for firewood or using paraffin stoves in their rooms, lying around on bedding with their boots on, and hanging their wet clothing up to dry in the hotel’s vast corridors. Another guest noted that the building’s clogged drains filled the hotel with odours, while residents were seen invading the kitchen to fetch water and cook food while room service was no longer available.

Around the time Count Rostov is sent to his room, as it were, the hotel had seen better days, and the hotel’s new manager, appointed by the Bolshevik party, was desperate to save it from gaining a reputation as a brothel. The real turnaround came in the mid-1920s, when the Bolshevik party decided that, aside from housing Soviet officials (since the country’s capital had changed from St Petersburg to Moscow), the Metropol would be key for convincing decadent Westerns that Communist Russia was flourishing. They opened the doors to international visitors while setting a lavish banquet in front of them in the most ostentatious hotel in Russia. And back came the waiters, bellhops, uniforms, service and silverware – along with enough spies for everyone.

Dinner took forever

For hotel guests and visitors, the revitalised Metropol restaurant service became as labyrinthine as the hotel itself. During the 1940s, American author John Steinbeck wrote in A Russian Journal, “The waiter, when he takes an order, writes it very carefully in a book. But he doesn’t go then and request the food. He goes to the bookkeeper, who makes another entry covering the food that has been ordered, and issues a slip which goes to the kitchen. There, another entry is made, and certain food is requested. When the food is finally issued, an entry of the food issued is also made out on a slip, which is given to the waiter. But he doesn’t bring the food back to the table. He takes his slip to the bookkeeper, who makes another entry that such food as has been ordered has been issued, and gives another slip to the waiter, who then goes back to the kitchen and brings the food to the table, making a note in his book that the food which has been ordered, which has been entered, and which has been delivered, is now, finally, on the table…”

Now multiply that concept by all the hotel’s services…

It’s on site

Everything in the Metropol is on a grand scale. When Amor Towles visited during the 1990s, the staff gave him a tour of the kitchen areas, which he described as “a warren of interconnected rooms covering the expanse of a city block.” During the early days of communism, the hotel needed to make everything they served on site, so facilities included butchery, fish cleaning, vegetable storage, and rows of refrigerated rooms.

The “on site” idea carried through to the restaurant, which (at least in the 1930s) included a giant marble fountain and fish pond in the centre of the restaurant dance floor, from which the chef would personally scoop the catch of the day to be prepared in the kitchen on the request of spoiled clients (although according to modern guides at the hotel, what they really did was to chuck the fish out once the kitchen door closed behind them, before preparing a more suitable fish for dinner). Occasionally, a drunken punter would fall into the pond. What a night out!

It’s … not in Russia?

Using the real hotel was out of the question as filming started in February 2023, and Russia had invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The series itself was, instead, shot in the UK, with Bolton’s town hall standing in for the exterior of the Bolshoi ballet theatre after a tweak from visual effects to remove its tower. For exterior sets, they constructed the roof with its backdrop image of Moscow, along with the fragment of the hotel exterior around the main doors. on a soundstage and backlot at Space Studios in Manchester.

Over the course of five months, the production design team built several key sets at Space Studios to represent the hotel interior, including Rostov’s sixth floor attic room with its secret annex tower. The main set was built around the lobby with its inlaid, patterned floors (hand-painted by production staff on laminate and MDF), and wooden railway-style banquette bench where everyone sits to greet their friends at the hotel – and where Rostov sits as the world changes around him.

The lobby was built as a set along with its adjoining reception desk with its key and mail cubbies, grand staircases, the barbershop, the bar, the mezzanine, and the hotel’s central lift. The production team made believable leaded stained glass elements using glass paint on perspex outlined in polished leading for the decoration above the lift areas. The central atrium dome in the restaurant, however, was printed on lightweight, translucent material, and then overpainted to give it a more glass-like texture.

Additionally, production built the main restaurant (and sourced every one of its matching chairs), and two luxurious suites, the green and coral one to represent the Count’s original Imperial Suite, and another with a blue colour scheme and completely different architectural details to stand for the other luxurious suite we see in the series (no spoilers). While the Metropol itself has miles of corridors, the set designers built just one long U-shaped corridor, where they swapped out the carpet and room numbers when they needed to show that the corridor was on a different floor of the hotel.

Welcome to the Hotel Metropol Moscow. Check in and check out the details when you stream A Gentleman in Moscow S1 on Showmax. New episodes Mondays from 20:30.