Alexey Shchusev was one of the most distinguished architects of the Soviet era, a designer of projects from the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale to Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square. His design for the Hotel Moskva, however, was less successful. Legend has it that Stalin was shown alternative fa?ades and unwittingly approved both. No one had the courage to press the question, so they built the two adjacent to one another. Attending the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in 1937, Frank Lloyd Wright (whose wife had grown up in Moscow) reportedly condemned it as the ugliest building he had ever seen.

It was a view shared by Yury Luzhkov, the Yeltsin-appointed former mayor of Moscow, who had it demolished in 2004. But this in turn provoked an outcry. Muscovites held a deep affection for the two-faced behemoth, an image of which has graced bottles of Stolichnaya vodka since 1948. The only solution was to reconstruct it exactly as it had looked, right down to the gigantic Cyrillic letters that run along its roof, spelling its original name. You can understand then that Four Seasons, the Canadian hotel management company that oversaw the rebuild and now operates the hotel (and whose name appears in rather smaller Roman type above the colonnaded portico), has had a tough time. It should have opened in 2008. Instead it was unveiled on October 30 this year.

The designers of its new interiors, London-based Richmond International, have aimed to recreate the imposing neoclassical public areas of the original building, at least in spirit. But during the build the mysterious disappearance from a warehouse of many of the original chandeliers and clocks salvaged during the demolition means that everything has had to be made anew and at first glance it all looks a bit too shiny. Even so, British double agent Guy Burgess, who resided here after his defection in 1951, might still recognise the columns, pilasters, myriad chandeliers and preternaturally gleaming marble floor, which, like the sporting mosaics that surround the glass-roofed swimming pool, have all been carefully recreated.