With Peter the Great’s defeat of Charles the XII of Sweden, the south coast of the Gulf of Finland became the site of a string of summer palaces running west out of St. Petersburg. Peter founded Peterhof near Kronstadt, which he had built in the Gulf to protect the sea approach to the city. Peter’s childhood friend, Prince Menshikov built a summer palace here. Catherine the Great’s husband, the short lived Peter III, lived nearby at Oranienbaum.

This new town of about 200 acres is five miles west of Peterhof on a low marshy coast. Kronstadt is visible across the water to the northeast. The distant coast of Finland is visible on clear days to the north. The land rises gradually from reedy marshes behind the dunes, to stands of small birches and then a pine forest, and to the road that connected the palaces to the city.

The program for this project is a two hundred room hotel, spa and
conference center. It is the largest building by far in a master plan by DPZ. There are several urban design considerations. The hotel’s bulk must be integrated gracefully into the residential scale of the surrounding blocks. The site is prominently situated on the water and along a road that connects two marinas. There is no back side from which servicing can take place so servicing has to be hidden by other means. Three prominent land approaches to the hotel require that it present an affecting massing on all sides. A two hundred by four hundred foot forecourt will have to be the first major plaza for the project.

The hotel is instrumental in forming a number of important spacesnot only its interior courtyard, which is about 140 feet on a side, but the forecourt itself, and a pedestrian passage that conducts non guests to the conference center and spa. Sixty adjunct cottages have to be made to feel like an integral part of the hotel. We have also used the cottages to help form a seaside promenade for guests and non-guests, alike. Sports and health care are an important part of the hotel’s program and the hotel site plan incorporates tennis courts, a skating rink, squash courts, swimming pools, and a lower and upper lawn on the gulf sideof the hotel.

These areas, as well as the service yard, are typically knit into a checker board pattern of buildings and greens.

People will come here because of the sea, but the courtyard is the heart of the hotel itself. The tall wings of the hotel are on the north side of courtyard, the low wings on the south side. This protects the courtyard from stiff winds off the Gulf and allows as much low angled sun into the courtyard as possible. All rooms are afforded great views, most toward the water, but some toward the south- toward the courtyard, the town, and the pine forest starting a block from the hotel. The hotel is lifted above a plinth of parking and service spaces that run continuously below the main floor, so all rooms clear the roofs of surrounding houses.

The conference center and spa, which require both heated inside access from the hotel, and separate outdoor access from the street, are accessible from a mid block passage three meters above the street.

Great care was taken to make this 450 foot passage as beautiful as a small street. You rise to it from stairs on the hotel’s forecourt. You are coaxed along by a string of elements- an entrance to the hotel courtyard in the base of a small tower, the conference center’s porch, a bridge and tower that connect the hotel to the spa and conference center, the spa’s colonnade at the edge of the raised hotel lawn, stairs back down to the sea side promenade, and the spa’s semi-circular pool on the dunes. The promenade is enlivened by the alternating lawns and alleys of the adjunct cottages, by a lower lawn at the edge of the sea, by the waterline, by the spa pool and monumental stairs to the hotel.

The hotel’s size is mitigated by laying lower wings up against the higher wings, and cottages against lower wings. This is evident in various forms in views from all sides of the hotel. Even as parts of the hotel loom, wherever the hotel meets the residential blocks squarely, the walls and rooflines of the project nearly match those of adjacent houses.