Delhi NCR · Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road, Lutyens' Delhi
Low, white and built round a lawn — the capital before it started building upward.
You turn off Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road — Aurangzeb Road until 2015, and half of Delhi still calls it that — into a short drive under old trees, and the building does not rise in front of you. It spreads. Low, white, arcaded, 4 storeys at most, with a lawn running away to one side and hedges clipped square against the wings. Inside the doors everything changes: a stair curving up under a painted ceiling, brass balusters, a deep red runner, and the noise of central Delhi simply stopping.
Ask for a balcony room over the courtyard and be in it at half past 5 in February. The pool sits between the wings two floors below, the palms come up past the rail, and the light goes along the far balconies one at a time. Inside, the house does not do restraint — paper printed with birds, a chandelier a size too large for the room, a gold cover on the bed — and at that hour, with the doors open and the tea tray on the balcony table, none of it is too much.
This is a hotel with a long memory and very little theatre. The staff are old guard — the kind who remember what you drank last March and never mention it. Nothing here explains itself to you. It has been on this lawn since 1955, and the trick it has never lost is looking like somebody's house rather than somebody's asset.
The Cinqtuair Spa. Rooms painted wall to wall with palms and colonnades, and behind them a treatment list that is unexpectedly serious: hyperbaric oxygen, cryo-EMS, compression therapy. Book the ordinary abhyanga anyway. It is what the therapists here do best.
The courtyard pool. A curved sheet of blue in the crook between the wings, chequered stone around it and palms over the loungers. The building encloses it on 3 sides, which is why it is quiet at an hour when the road outside is not.
The billiard room. A full-size table under low green shades, a hunting mural the length of the wall behind it, and a door that closes. It is a room the hotel kept rather than a facility it installed.
The lawn. It runs to 2 acres, hedged square and falling away from the west wing. Marquees go up for weddings and come down again, and on an ordinary Sunday brunch is served on it. From November to February it is where you will want to be.
The Claridges sells 13 room types, and the list is not a size list. The first 3 rooms are all 26 square metres, and are separated by what they face and how the furniture is laid out, not by floor area.
The real steps are 3: a sitting corner in the Luxury King Bed Room, and a balcony in the Luxury King Bed Room with Balcony.
The last step is a door, at the Executive Suite. Everything past that is decoration, and the decoration is very good.
The Luxury King Bed Room with Balcony and the Luxury Twin Bed Room with Balcony are the only 2 rooms with a balcony over the courtyard. From October to March they are the best rooms here for the money: breakfast outside, the pool below, palms coming up past the rail. From April to September the balcony goes mostly unused.
A Grand Luxury Room, with more space inside, suits the warmer months better.
Every room and suite at The Claridges is sold for 2 adults, up to and including the Presidential Suite. Children can share — 1 on a room, 2 on a suite — but no extra adult bed goes into any key. If you are 3 adults travelling together, you need 2 rooms here, and there is no room that solves it. That is unusual at this level in Delhi, and worth knowing before you look at the rates.
It has been on this lawn since 1955, and the trick it has never lost is looking like somebody's house rather than somebody's asset.
12 Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Road
Lutyens' Delhi
New Delhi, National Capital Territory 110011
India
A child is 12 or under.
Rates are quoted for your dates.
Room
26 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
No view
The entry room, at 26 square metres, under a ceiling much higher than that number suggests. A buttoned headboard the width of the wall, engravings of the old city, and a window large enough to keep the room bright until 4. No view, and none claimed. Take it and put the difference into a fourth night.
Room
26 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
No view
The same 26 square metres with two beds in it, and it is genuinely a different room rather than a bed choice: the desk moves under the window and the wardrobe wall changes sides, so the room reads long rather than square. For two colleagues, or a parent and a grown child, it is the better room and not a compromise.
Room
26 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
The pool
The Superior Room faces the water. It is worth the small step because the pool sits in the courtyard between the wings, so the window gives you something enclosed, green and quiet instead of a road. Butter-yellow walls, a slim four-poster, and the blue of the water 2 floors down.
Room
28 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
No view
The room is 28 square metres, with parquet underfoot rather than carpet, and the reason to move up from a Superior is the sitting corner: a teal sofa, a wing chair and a low table, far enough from the bed that one of you can be awake in it. A rosewood headboard, a teal bench at the foot, and framed botanicals instead of monuments.
Room
30 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
The pool courtyard, from a balcony
The room is 30 square metres, and the balcony over the courtyard is the reason to take it: two cane chairs and a table on the tiles, palms coming up past the rail, the pool below. Inside, paper printed with birds and a chandelier that has no business in a room this size and is much better for it.
Room
30 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
The pool and the gardens, from a balcony
The balcony room with two beds, in a different scheme entirely: red and white stripe to the cornice, one buttoned grey headboard running behind both beds, and a chandelier over the middle of the floor. It is 30 square metres, onto the pool and the gardens, and the only twin here with a balcony.
Room
42 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
The gardens
At 42 square metres the room stops being a bedroom and becomes a room with furniture in it. Chinoiserie panels of birds and blossom run the full length of the wall, a curtained four-poster stands between two white columns, and a navy Chesterfield and two tub chairs face it across a Persian carpet. It is the best room here that is not a suite.
Room
42 m² · Sleeps 2 + 1 child
The gardens
The same 42 square metres in a quieter scheme: flowered paper with a gold band above the picture rail, carved dark headboards, a blue velvet chaise in the sitting corner and a writing desk turned to the window. There is enough floor between the beds and the seating that neither person is in the other's room. It is the best twin in the house.
Suite
51 m² · Sleeps 2 + 2 children
The gardens
The first room here with a door between the bed and everybody else, at 51 square metres. The sitting end is a small library — burl-wood shelves either side of an arch, a wing chair, a low yellow table — and the bedroom behind is papered in blossom, with a day bed the width of the bed at its foot. Take it the moment anyone is going to come to your room.
Suite
56 m² · Sleeps 2 + 2 children
The pool and the gardens
It is 56 square metres arranged as a drawing room with a bedroom off it, and the drawing room is the reason: gilded columns at both ends, blossom panels, tan leather sofas at one end and a round table at the other that 6 can eat at. The bedroom behind has a quilted headboard the width of the wall and a window onto the pool. Take it if you are going to have people in the room.
Suite
65 m² · Sleeps 2 + 2 children
The gardens
The suite the hotel named after itself, and the one room here that nothing else in the building resembles: pale blue and gold, green marble columns, a coffered ceiling over the bed, and a dining end that seats 6 with chinoiserie panels behind it. It is 65 square metres, and there is one of them. Ask for it by name, and ask early.
Suite
66 m² · Sleeps 2 + 2 children
Its own walled courtyard
It is 66 square metres on the ground floor with a walled courtyard of its own, and a whirlpool sunk into the deck of it under a green-striped awning. Nothing overlooks it. Inside, a teal-covered bed against a mirrored wall, and a small sitting room with a tan Chesterfield, a chessboard and an old map on green panelling. The oddest room in the house, and the one people come back for.
Suite
126 m² · Sleeps 2 + 2 children
The gardens
An apartment of 126 square metres: a drawing room across pale marble with a mirrored screen the length of one wall, a dining room that seats 8 under a painting of horses, and a bedroom behind both with a slim four-poster and a curved sofa at its foot. There is one, and it goes out perhaps 100 nights a year.
A short list of extraordinary places to stay.
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