Built on a four-acre natural island at the centre of Lake Pichola, the white marble palace that became the Taj Lake Palace was commissioned by Maharana Jagat Singh II of Mewar in 1746 as a pleasure retreat — a place of leisure and ceremony entirely surrounded by water, with the Aravalli Hills as its permanent backdrop. What makes the property so singular is not merely its setting but the fact that the architecture was always conceived as a kind of floating apparition, its colonnaded facades and chattri-topped pavilions designed to dissolve into their own reflection. Managed by the Taj Hotels group since 1971, the palace was converted into a hotel with 83 rooms and suites without disturbing the essential geometry of its Rajput and Mughal-inflected form. Inside, the rooms move between registers: some suites carry deep-carved teak friezes running along corniced ceilings, black-and-white marble floors laid in bold chevron patterns, and four-poster beds beneath crystal chandeliers, while lake-facing rooms offer hand-painted wall murals of birds and flowering branches, polished Makrana marble underfoot, and arched window alcoves wide enough to sit in and watch the water. The rooftop pool, framed by a scallop-arched colonnade and a domed Rajput pavilion topped with white marble figures, frames the City Palace and surrounding ghats in a composition that manages to feel intimate rather than monumental. In the bar, jali marble screens and cane-and-teak furniture hold the Mewar craft tradition lightly, without theatre.

No travel notes provided yet.

No description provided yet.