The most lavish hotel room
Built at a cost of £200m, the super-swanky Ritz-Carlton (+7 495 225 8888, ritzcarlton.com) charges a minimum £388 a night. Pricey, but a snip compared with a night in its palatial Ritz-Carlton Suite, which costs from £11,125. For that you get a five-room apartment with a view of the Kremlin, a grand piano, sauna and ‘security room’ equipped with its own energy supply and telecommunications system. The whole suite is furnished in an imperial style with antiques sourced from across Europe, and its windows are swagged in ochre damask.
The fanciest restaurant
The £25m gilded interiors at Turandot (+7 495 739 0011) make those at Versailles seem understated. Named after the anti-heroine of Puccini’s Peking-set opera, it’s a riot of chinoiserie, gold rococo moulding and Aubusson tapestries (real ones, natch). Staff wear faux 18th-century uniforms and a baroque orchestra performs on a rotating stage. Expect to pay at least £100 a head.
The most surreal shop
Part fashion emporium, part bar-cum-nightclub (there are DJs and you can drink here till 6am), the flagship of Moscow’s pre-eminent fashion designer Denis Simachev (+7 495 629 5702, denissimachev.com) is a surreal store located between Burberry and Hermès. Even if it weren’t for the queue of Hummers outside, its swirling red-and-yellow exterior makes it unmissable. And it’s no more restrained inside: a heady conflation of loud Versace-style animal prints, erotic Japanese animé mosaics, Soviet memorabilia and incongruously positioned bathroom fittings… An assault on the senses.
The best bathhouse
The legendary Russian opera singer Fyodor Chaliapin called the Sanduny Banya (+7 495 625 4631, sanduny.ru) the ‘tsar of bathhouses’. Built in 1896, it’s a sequence of ornately decorated chandelier-lit chambers, all gilded moulding, lofty ceilings supported by slender columns and acres of marble. Shame the women’s section, which has the look of a fairly ordinary modern spa, is so much less splendid than the men’s.
The big night out
Bolshoi (+7 495 250 7317, bolshoi.ru) means ‘big’ in Russian, and in terms of grandeur, an evening at the opera or ballet is the perfect big night out. The hot opera ticket this season is Rimsky-Korsakov’s epic fairy-tale extravaganza, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia (from 2 December). For balletomanes, there is, inevitably, a run of the Christmas classic Nutcracker (from 21 December), though Giselle – especially if Natalia Osipova is dancing – should be more thrilling still.
The Magnificence of the Tsars is at London’s V&A Museum (vam.ac.uk), from 10 December to 29 March.
British Airways flies to Moscow from London Heathrow. Book a flight on ba.com now.
