Taj Falaknuma Palace

The approach is deliberately anticlimactic. Engine Bowli is an ordinary south Hyderabad street, tight and loud, and the gate at the bottom of the hill gives no sign that anything is above it. Then the car stops, and you do not get back into it. What is waiting is a landau — two horses, a liveried driver, a fringed canopy — and the last stretch is done at a walking pace up a switchback through the trees, which takes about 4 minutes and rearranges your expectations completely. The building arrives all at once at the top: a white Palladian front 609 metres above the city, arcaded the whole way along, with domes standing off the roofline. Somebody scatters rose petals down the marble staircase as you climb it. It is theatre, obviously. It also ends with you on a terrace looking down at 400 years of Hyderabad, and it works on absolutely everybody.

The rooms are in the residential wings, which is to say the parts of the palace a family actually lived in, and they have the proportions to prove it: ceilings you could not afford to build now, exposed timber beams, deep window reveals, and painted motifs run round the walls, redone stroke by stroke during the restoration. At 6 the garden side goes gold. The light comes in low under the arcade, crosses the polished floor, and finds the brass; the ceiling fan turns under the beams because the room was designed to be cooled by air rather than by machinery and still can be. Outside, the peacocks that live in the gardens start up — a sound like a rusty gate, at volume, from somewhere in the jacaranda — and then the whole southern horizon lights up in pieces as the old city switches on below you. Do not draw the curtains. The room's best hour costs nothing and lasts about 40 minutes.

Butlers, in the old sense: not a folded-towel service but people who know the building, which at a house this size is the useful skill. The heritage walk is where you see it. It goes out at sunset with the palace's own historian, and it is not a circuit of the public rooms with dates attached — it is somebody explaining what the Paigahs were, why the Nizam wanted the house and what happened to the family that built it, in a building where all of that is still on the walls. Qawwali is sung live in the courtyards in the evenings. Everything is soft, unhurried and slightly formal, which suits a palace better than warmth would, and nobody performs at you. They will lay a table for two almost anywhere in the building if you ask.