Khas Bagh

The road out of Jaipur climbs past Amer, thins to one lane, and gives up on the city altogether — mustard fields, a village, and then a wall. Khas Bagh is behind it, and the first thing you meet is not a lobby but a carved sandstone gateway with a cusped arch and a jaali parapet, opening straight through into a courtyard with a fountain running on black-and-white chequered marble. The house is not old. It was built in the last 20 years by craftsmen from the villages around it, in rubble stone and pink Karauli sandstone, with jharokhas cut into the walls and verandahs on arches, and it is the better for being honest about that: nothing here is a conversion, so nothing here is a compromise. The second thing you meet is the horses.

Every room has a jharokha — a stone window bay deep enough to sit in — and by 5 in the afternoon that is where you are. The Aravallis go from green to grey to a flat charcoal line, the parakeets do their evening circuit of the mango trees, and the light in the room drops to the two lamps beside the bed. Inside it is marble underfoot, a carved four-poster, Venetian mirrors, block-printed cotton, and a great deal of furniture that was bought rather than sourced. The bathroom has a jaali screen over the shower, so at that hour the wall opposite fills with small geometric pieces of the last of the sun.

The 25 rooms are staffed almost entirely from the villages on the other side of the wall, and the house is run by Ransher Singh, a polo player, with his father, Colonel N. S. Rathore, a retired Para Commando officer of the Indian Army. Nobody is performing a heritage here, because nobody has to: it is the family's own house, the photographs on the wall are of them, and the horses in the paddock are theirs. What you get in place of choreography is speed and memory. Tea arrives at the hour you took it yesterday, the dog turns up on the lawn, and by the second morning nobody asks your name.