Lalbagh
Begun by Hyder Ali as a private garden and finished by his son, with a glasshouse at the centre built in the pattern of the Crystal Palace. At the southern end, a bare grey outcrop older than almost anything on earth.
The collection
Bengaluru
Karnataka · A garden that took up engineering
Breakfast is a queue on the pavement: steel plates, a dosa off the griddle a metre away, no table and nobody in any hurry to find you one. At three thousand feet the heat never properly arrives, so the day is lived out of doors until the sky closes at four, empties itself in twenty minutes, and the streets come back smelling of wet dust and jasmine.
Bengaluru sits high enough that the heat never quite finds it — a plateau city of rain trees and old cantonment bungalows that spent a century being India's most agreeable place to retire and then, almost by accident, became the place it goes to work. The two versions are still visible from the same window: a canopy of jacaranda over a street where nothing is older than the last funding round. It keeps its pleasures indoors and behind gates — a courtyard, a filter-coffee counter, a bar that has been quietly good for thirty years.
- When to go
- The city is temperate year-round, which is its whole argument, but October to February is when it is at its best — dry, mild, the jacaranda and rain trees at their fullest. Late March into April brings the flowering and a little more heat. The monsoon months are soft rather than punishing, and the gardens are never greener.
The landmarks
Cubbon Park
Three hundred acres held in the middle of the city, the red Gothic courts standing along one edge and the library along another. On Sundays the roads through it close and the whole of it goes back to walkers.
Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace
Two storeys of teak — pillars, cusped arches, painted ceilings — standing small and dark and cool in the middle of the old market district. He called it the envy of heaven, and the inscription is still there.
The houses
Rates are quoted for your dates.
2 houses · In our order
MG Road
The Oberoi
A rain tree older than the hotel, and a balcony on every room that looks at it.
- The rain tree
- Breakfast under it
- A balcony per room
