The Prince’s Suite is resplendent in rich fabrics and vintage decor

Step inside the Royal Peacock Suite at Jaipur’s luxurious Rambagh Palace. As the name suggests there are starbursts of peacocks everywhere with their tails spread wide. There are peacock motifs on the walls, around the dressing table and even on the richly designed drapes. Or would you prefer Sukh Nivas with its circular bed with a rich canopy above it, chandeliers and gold leaf frescoes?

The Rambagh Palace was the first sprawling royal residence in India to be turned into a hotel welcoming well-heeled guests back in 1957. At the time the royal family, including the legendary Maharani Gayatri Devi were still in residence in part of the building.

Now the hotel — which is run by the Taj Group — has undergone a nine-year-long restoration and re-decoration process. When the restoration began nine years ago, Gayatri Devi’s brief was simple and to the point: “Make it the world’s classiest hotel. Bring in all the luxury for the indulgent traveller but do not touch its legacy.”

Rambagh Palace is a picture of grandeur inside and out; (top) Sukh Nivas is a study in opulence with a circular bed draped with golden-hued curtains

She did offer some other words of advice for design consultants Amit and Shalini Gehlot of Asa, who supervised the upgradation of the palace. She wanted them to treat the spaces, “as if they were designing guest rooms for a private residence and not a hotel, so that guests feel they are part of the household as a royal guest.”

Says Amit: “The challenge was enormous since the palace was not designed as a hotel. We had to act judiciously to retain the heritage flavour and blend it with the most modern amenities.” The other major difficulty they faced was that the transformation had to be done while the hotel remained operational. So the renovation was spread over a period of nine seasons.

With Gayatri Devi gone, the tussle over the Rs 1,000 crore royal properties including Rambagh has escalated. But that has not stopped the royals from spending a whopping Rs 80 crore to refurbish the hotel.

Gayatri Devi was extremely fond of Rambagh. It had been her home since she arrived in Jaipur at the age of 20, as the third wife of the dashing Sawai Man Singh II in 1940.

The queen maintained her emotional attachment to the palace even after her husband built her the French-styled Lilypool, adjacent to Rambagh in the same complex and she shifted there.

Built in 1835, the Rambagh Palace is set on 47 acres, and the hustle and bustle of the city can barely be heard as one criss-crosses its marbled corridors. Once inside, luxury is the leitmotif. Those who’ve stayed in the palace during Gayatri Devi’s time include Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Jacqueline Kennedy, Prince Charles and actor Omar Sharif.

When the Gehlots were commissioned to renovate the palace, they first started by making a detailed study of the archives to understand the evolution and history of the palace. One of the major problems they faced was that there was an unusual mix of rooms in the palace. They finally decided to rework that to weed out the rooms that were too small or lacking the royal touch.

The Suryavanshi Suite is adorned with peacock motifs and delicate mirror and stone work

As a result, the existing 104 rooms and suites were converted to 79 (33 suites and 46 rooms, all different in character — and not just from a layout point of view. Says Shalini: “This meant that the design exercise was many times more complicated than a typical hotel where one typical layout and décor scheme is repeated over a number of units.”

So the Royal Peacock Suite is studded with peacock motifs and has delicate mirror and stone work, and teak pillars with marble inlay. And the Presidential Suite has green Udaipur stone arches and the Badal Mahal has a matchless Jacuzzi.

However, the Maharani Suite, especially done up for Gayatri Devi, has been left unchanged. It remains the same as it was as decorated by Hammond’s of London, with the most spectacular oval fixture mirrored bathroom.

To revive local art, a conscious effort was made to employ craftsmen from the surrounding areas, to recreate the splendour of the bygone eras. This resulted in the revival of dying forms like theekri work (a form of decorative broken glass work) in the corridors.

Gayatri Devi did not live to see the transformation of Rambagh. But she would probably have been pleased by the final results. This is still a place where one can step back in time and re-live the romance of Rajputana.