The article contains an analysis of the processes related to the everyday life of merchants in the Orenburg province of the post-reform era. On the one hand, hotel business was just another type of everyday business activity for Orenburg merchants, another area where they could put into practice their entrepreneurial skills and ideas on how to conduct business properly, and where they strived for maximum profit. On the other hand, town hotels were acting as attraction points for people visiting Orenburg and the uyezd centers of the region, and they shaped the image of the local urban environment that media then spread throughout Russia. In the second half of the XIX - early XX century Orenburg merchants' views on business ethics and the principles of business relations underwent a significant transformation. In the hotel business these transformations were expressed in the form of more comfortable living conditions for guests. Hotels began to provide not only clean rooms with comfortable furniture, ventilation, plumbing, water closets, but also restaurant quality food service, leisure-time activities, as well as technical innovations such as electric lighting in the rooms and telephones. For comfortable living of those wealthy citizens who did not own their own separate houses, entrepreneurs began to build multi-storey apartment buildings, not only solving utilitarian housing problems, but also creating an absolutely new architectural appearance of the city. As a result, completely new conditions were created in which the everyday life of not only the merchants but also all other citizens of the Orenburg province occurred, and they gradually formed a new urban lifestyle, a new urban everyday life.
