Umaid Bhawan Palace

The road climbs out of the blue city and keeps climbing, and then the trees stop and there it is: 347 rooms of golden chittar sandstone on top of its own hill, a dome 45 metres over the middle of it, and a lawn running away from the steps for what looks like a quarter of a mile. It was begun in 1929 as famine relief — 3,000 men on the payroll for 15 years, cutting blocks that interlock without mortar — and finished in 1943. Inside the doors the sound stops, the temperature drops, and you are standing under the dome looking at a gilded star set into the floor.

The rooms face either the Baradari Lawns or the courtyards, and either way the last hour of light is the one to be in them. Umaid Singh ordered his interiors from London and the ship carrying them was sunk in the war. What came instead was a Polish painter, Stefan Norblin, waiting the war out in India, who spent 3 years covering these walls in murals: peacocks, hunting scenes, the Ramayana, in a green-and-gold Art Deco one man invented in one building. So the room at dusk is a very high ceiling, a slow fan, striped marble underfoot, brass and burr walnut, and a wall you keep looking at. Then the lawn lights come on and the fort goes black on its cliff across the city.

This is a house with an owner in it. His Highness Gaj Singh II and his family live in their own wing and always have, and what that does to the staff is not deference but care: nobody here is running a property, they are keeping a house. Butlers come with the room, the doorman has been at that door a very long time, and nothing about the service is being proved to you. You are not being shown a palace. You are staying in one third of a house whose owner is at home in the other third, and the staff know exactly where the line is.