Chai-Kofe na Myasnitskoy (Perlov Tea House)

The Perlov family had traded tea in Moscow since 1752, and in 1890 Sergei Vasilievich Perlov struck out with his own firm, commissioning architect Roman Klein to build a three-story Renaissance-style shop and apartment house on Myasnitskaya Street, completed in 1893. Its ground floor sold tea; the upper floors held Perlov's own residence and rented flats — until 1895 gave the building its real identity.

That year, word reached Moscow that Li Hongzhang, the Chinese Empire's envoy, would attend Tsar Nicholas II's coronation. Hoping to win exclusive supply contracts, Perlov hired a young architect, Karl Gippius, to reclad the whole facade in pseudo-Chinese style within months: dark purple marble, Chinese-made ceramic tiles, mythical-animal figures, and a two-tiered pagoda tower hung with bells, finished in 1896. Li Hongzhang visited a rival Perlov relative's older shop instead — but the building's transformation outlived the disappointment, becoming one of Moscow's most recognizable storefronts.

The tea shop survived nationalization after 1917, trading through the Soviet decades as the ground-floor tenant of a building otherwise carved into communal flats. Restoration, secured by Perlov's own great-granddaughter in 1998, finished in 2012. The ground floor still sells loose tea and coffee today, under the same pagoda roof Karl Gippius built to impress a dignitary who never came.