Few addresses in Delhi carry the weight of Aurangzeb Road — now Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road — where The Claridges has stood since 1952, a low white modernist building set within gardens that feel lifted from the Lutyens bungalow zone surrounding it. The original structure, designed in a restrained post-independence idiom, was conceived by the Swiss Hotel School graduate Steffan Lohia as a place that could hold its own alongside the imperial geometry of Edwin Lutyens's city planning without deferring to it. The result is a property whose architecture carries the calm confidence of early Indian modernism — horizontal bands of glazing, white rendered facades, and a landscape of clipped trees and immaculate lawn that the exterior images confirm remains very much intact. Inside, the 136 rooms draw on a palette of warm taupes and gold, with dark-stained hardwood floors, four-poster beds in ebonised timber, and burr-walnut cabinetry that bridge colonial comfort and contemporary restraint. The pool terrace, framed by royal palms and a chequerboard stone surround, holds the hotel's mid-century bones most clearly. The Dhaba restaurant, refurbished in a more recent intervention, takes a bolder direction — a bold herringbone floor in black and white, tan Chesterfield banquettes, cane dining chairs, and a ceiling printed with an antique world map overhead, a gesture that nods to the cosmopolitan Delhi of the Nehru era while acknowledging that the city has moved on.

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