Arseny Morozov was a representative of a noble merchant family and was a cousin of Savva Morozov. In his youth, Arseny Abramovich traveled extensively in Europe, and on one of his trips to him and his friend, architect Viktor Mazyrin, made an indelible impression on the Pena Palace in Sintra. After returning to Russia, the young merchant decided to build a mansion for himself, resembling a Portuguese palace.

Very soon, on the site that Arseny inherited from his mother, instead of a small mansion in the style of classicism, an eccentric building appeared, really reminiscent of its Portuguese counterpart. The Spanish-Moorish style with its intricate lace-like patterns, stucco molding, columns was very unusual for Moscow, so contemporaries accepted Morozov's mansion with hostility — it seemed to them overly pretentious and eccentric. The decor really turned out to be colorful: it seems that the building came here straight from sunny Madrid. By the way, the interior turned out to be no less bright: flowerpots, statues, chandeliers, Gothic stairs reflected Morozov's ideas about an ideal home.

However, a connoisseur of Spanish and Moorish flavor did not live in his mansion for long — he shot himself in the leg on a bet and died of blood poisoning.

After the revolution, the mansion housed anarchists, later - the troupe of a traveling theater, then the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, embassies of different countries, and after 1959 - the House of Friendship of Peoples. In 2003, the building was restored and the original interior was recreated. The Reception House of the Russian Government is now located here.