One of the main reasons I inevitably stayed at Costes is that I found it a perfect place to write. The hotel’s restaurant is in an interior courtyard (with awnings that get extended in case of rain) in which distractingly attractive waiters and waitresses serve fashionable clientele from noon until the early hours of the morning-all to the tune of the hotel’s branded style of international lounge music. Though established in the early 1990s, the Costes’s interior is a fin de siècle fantasy with plush velvet couches tucked in nooks, 19th-century paintings hanging on the walls, and candles burning everywhere. When I traveled professionally in Europe, I would inevitably spend a weekend at the Hôtel Costes around the corner from the Place Vendôme in Paris. Thus there were butcheries, fish cleaning facilities, vegetable pantries, bakeries, and rows of refrigerated rooms abutting the actual kitchens. As the hotel’s manager explained, this was a vestige of the austere early days of Communism, when the hotel had to make virtually anything they wanted to serve. One of the most eye-opening aspects of that tour was the kitchen-a warren of interconnected rooms covering the expanse of a city block. While on that stay, the gracious staff gave me a comprehensive tour of the hotel. When I was about two-thirds of the way through the first draft of the novel, I returned to Moscow and spent a week at the Metropol in Suite 217-the very room in which the first Soviet constitution was drafted in the aftermath of the Revolution. It was the memory of that short visit that prompted me, some years later, to set A Gentleman in Moscow in the hotel.

When I visited Moscow for the first time in 1998, I wandered into the historic Metropol Hotel as a curious tourist simply to ogle the giant painted glass ceiling that hangs over the grand restaurant off the lobby.

Did you actually stay at the hotel to research the book? If so, what were your most interesting or surprising discoveries?

Recognizing that Western travelers would judge Communism harshly if they had no decent place to stay, the Soviets restored the Metropol's extravagance (silver service in the dining room, uniformed bellhops) against the backdrop of severe hardship for its citizenry. You've written about the Hotel Metropol's fascinating backstory: It was a Belle Époque grand hotel in the style of the Ritz in Paris or Claridge's in London, which was seized by the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution and used to house part of the new fledgling government. Here the author (who wrote an essay on his childhood obsession with grand hotels for Condé Nast Traveler’s September issue) reveals how he researched his book, and his favorite hotel for finding writing inspiration. Rules of Civility author Amor Towles’ engaging new novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking), tells the story of a Russian aristocrat who is kept under house arrest-for years-in the city’s Hotel Metropol.

Towles a gentleman in moscow