Peter the Great began developing Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland after Russia gained access to the Baltic during the Great Northern War. The name appears by 1705, and construction accelerated in the 1710s as architects, engineers, gardeners, artisans, soldiers, and serfs created a maritime imperial residence. A modest upper palace, the seafront Monplaisir retreat, formal gardens, canals, cascades, and fountains expressed Peter's new western-facing court. The site rivaled European royal complexes while celebrating Russia's military victory and the founding of nearby Saint Petersburg.

Peter personally influenced the layout, especially the relationship between palace, canal, fountains, and sea. Engineers exploited natural elevation and distant reservoirs to power jets largely by gravity rather than mechanical pumps. Later rulers repeatedly enlarged the ensemble. Under Empress Elizabeth, Bartolomeo Rastrelli transformed the Grand Palace during the 1740s and 1750s into a long Baroque ceremonial façade with gilded rooms, state apartments, church, and armorial pavilion. Catherine II and nineteenth-century emperors added Neoclassical interiors, smaller palaces, landscape parks, rail connections, and changing domestic arrangements.

After the 1917 Revolution, the imperial residences became public museums. Staff documented collections and opened palace rooms while Soviet interpretation recast dynastic luxury as evidence of the old regime. German forces occupied Peterhof from 1941 to 1944 during the siege of Leningrad. Looting, shelling, fire, demolition, and neglect devastated the Grand Palace, fountains, sculptures, trees, and many smaller buildings. Museum workers evacuated some objects and buried selected statues, but enormous losses remained. The palace shell stood ruined, and much interior decoration had vanished completely.

Restoration began before the war ended and became a major Soviet cultural project. Researchers used measured drawings, photographs, fragments, inventories, craft traditions, and surviving objects to recreate façades, carved ornament, parquet, textiles, paintings, sculpture, and fountain machinery. The Lower Park reopened in 1945, and restored palace rooms followed gradually. Some eighteenth-century masonry, garden alignments, buried pipework, sculpture, and rescued furnishings survive, but large portions of the Grand Palace and celebrated interiors are meticulous postwar reconstruction. Ongoing conservation continues to replace gilding, plumbing, roofs, plantings, and weathered decorative fabric.

The Peterhof State Museum-Reserve manages a complex of palaces, gardens, collections, fountains, and archaeological remains, with tickets and seasonal operations varying by area. Fountains normally depend on weather and scheduled operating seasons, while individual buildings may close for conservation. Peterhof's authenticity does not rest on claiming untouched survival. It lies in the documented relationship among landscape, water engineering, imperial ceremony, surviving fragments, and an extraordinary reconstruction campaign undertaken after deliberate wartime destruction. Visitors should distinguish Peter's early fabric, later dynastic additions, postwar replicas, and continuously renewed systems that keep the ensemble functioning.