Business travelers weary of the $350-per-night room charges at Moscow's Western-managed hotels have a friend in German entrepreneur Roland Reinhardt.


He and a fellow Berlin-based investor this week baptized -- literally -- the Art Hotel, a quiet 29-room venture hidden away in the faceless office structures of Moscow's far southwest region.


The hotel, under renovation for the more than a year, opened in January and on Wednesday, a Russian Orthodox priest conducted a traditional Russian blessing for the new building -- complete with holy water and incantations.


The rooms are small, clean and quiet, outfitted with contemporary black and white furnishings. The hotel offers full business services, cable television and a reasonably priced restaurant for the base charge of $96 per night for a single, $110 for a double room.


"I have lived in hotels in Moscow for two years and I wanted a place that was both inexpensive and good," said Reinhardts.


The prices will rise slightly when the hotel's fitness center and sauna open in a few weeks, he said, to about $136 for a double room, which includes breakfast and a trip to the airport. In the hotel's restaurant, called Level 5, basic Russian cuisine is served at basic prices. At lunch, entrees like spaghetti or pelmeni, Russian ravioli, are $5.


The two private investors have been able to keep prices low because they did not have to start from the ground up. In a business world where personal contacts are everything, the men knew the right people.


Reinhardt and his partner, Dieter Fietz, had worked closely with soccer officials in the former Soviet Union as the former manager and trainer, respectively, of the Union Berlin soccer team.After their former Russian sports associates privatized the sprawling Centrovostokservis office complex at 41 Vernadskogo Prospekt, behind the defunct Hotel Druzhba, Reinhardt and his partner formed joint ventures with them, including shipping and leasing office space within the complex. Located on the rear side of the complex, the hotel is difficult to find. There are no large signs on the road, only a discreet back door that says "Art Hotel." Getting to it requires a bumpy ride along an icy service road a couple of stoplights from the Prospekt Vernadskogo metro station. Security within the hotel itself does not extend beyond the key locks on the doors, and the attentiveness of hotel employees.


But the Art Hotel has already found a clientele among the 31 foreign firms that now rent office space from him within the same complex. Reinhardt has an additional 1,400 square meters of office space to rent, charging from $500 to $600 per square meter, also below market rates.


Though he has never managed a hotel before, Reinhardt feels confident that business travelers will be satisfied.


"You don't need to talk about how hard it is to do, you just need to do it," Reinhardt said. "You know, everything is a high-risk operation in Russia."