In 1898, Savva Mamontov and Petersburg Insurance consolidated a large lot of land around the former Chelyshev Hotel. Mamontov, manager and sponsor of Private Opera, intended to redevelop the area into a large cultural center built around an opera hall. In 1898, professional jury of an open contest awarded the job to Lev Kekushev, however, Mamontov intervened and assigned it to English architectWilliam Walcot, who proposed a refined Art Nouveau draft codenamed A Lady's Head. Mamontov eventually hired Kekushev as a construction manager. Soon, Savva Mamontov was jailed for fraud and the project was taken over by Petersburg Insurance, omitting the original plans for opera hall. In 1901, the topped-out shell burnt down and had to be rebuilt from scratch in reinforced concrete. Kekushev and Walcot hired a constellation of first-rate artists, notably Mikhail Vrubel for Princess of Dreams mosaic panel, Alexander Golovin for smaller ceramic panels and sculptor Nikolay Andreyev for plaster friezes. The hotel was completed in 1907. However, it is nowhere near Walcot's original design. A notable feature of Metropol is "its lack of any reference to the orders of architecture... a structural mass shaped without reference to illusionistic systems of support". Rectangular bulk of Metropol is self-sufficient, it needs no supporting columns. Instead, "Texture and material played a dominant expressive role, exemplified at the Metropole by the progression from an arcade with stone facing on the ground floor to inset windows without decorative frames on the upper floors". In 1918, the hotel was nationalized by Bolshevik administration, renamed Second House of Soviets and housed living quarters and offices of growing Sovietbureaucracy. Eventually, in 1930s it was converted to its original hotel function and went through a major restoration in 1986-1991 by Finnish companies as part of Soviet-Finnish bilateral trade. Today, Metropol has 365 rooms, and each is different in shape or decoration. The hotel is the setting of Amor Towles's 2016 novel, ''A Gentleman in Moscow.
