Kishore Singh gets a peek into Aman New Delhi, and is bowled over by its understated design and luxury.
Some time next week, when the first of Aman’s guests check discreetly into its New Delhi resort, it will be open season for the city’s best-kept secret. Ever since Adrian Zecha had bid for what was probably the capital’s tackiest hotel, the ITDC-run Lodhi, speculation had been rife: what could the founder of the luxury Aman group have been thinking of? Had he seen the location next to an open nullah, on one of the city’s busiest roads, facing a crematorium and a cemetery? Was this going to be the group’s colossal mistake?
Zecha and the Aman group kept a low profile in the almost ten years that it has taken for the Aman New Delhi to be commissioned, but, says general manager Antony Treston, though it seems like a long time, it was time well spent. Certainly, in the two and a half years since Treston has been here, several changes were made to the property: the city’s most stunning in terms of amenities, space and luxury. Of the total of 67 suites and rooms, for instance, as many as 53 have their own private plunge pools. Spread over six acres, the architect — Australian Kerry Hill — changed the entrance to a side road, so that the hotel, instead of looking outwards, is built to look inwards, where gardens and pools provide views and elements of tranquillity. And as you ascend to the eight-storey high Aman block of suites, the higgledy-piggledy skyline of slums is pierced by as many as five tombs, including the Humayun’s Tomb, the neighbouring church, office blocks and gardens.
Guests - and the city - are likely to be most curious about the design of the hotel. The Aman philosophy of design is best summed up by Zecha, who writes in Aman 2, the book that celebrates two decades of the group’s existence, thus: “Simplicity is the essence of elegance. You don’t achieve elegance by ‘gussying up’ things. When I walk into a building that looks rich and expensive, I feel uncomfortable and a bit intimidated — as if I should hold my breath and be careful not to touch anything.”
The Aman New Delhi does make you hold your breath, but not because you are intimidated, or overawed, but because it doesn’t look like a hotel. The feel — despite the highrise of the Aman block — is of driving home — okay, a rich home — where nothing is discordant, or strikes a false note. There is no obvious reception area, you arrive at the porte cochere and are escorted after a simple welcome to your suite without too much ceremony. All this, explains Treston, is the way the Aman guests — and they are the truly rich — like it.
Treston himself is an aberration: in a city where managers would never be seen without a tie, Treston does not wear any. In fact, nobody in the staff wears a tie, and there is no visible hierarchy in the uniforms. “Because Aman New Delhi will have some corporate guests, we cannot have staff barefeet, or in sarongs (as they do in some Aman resorts), so they will be smartly dressed in Indian kurta-pajamas, but without a sense of formal dressing up,” he says.
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But to get back to the design — the overriding theme is of stone. Dressed entirely in a soft yellow sandstone, its roughness balanced by a profusion of jaalis (pierced stone screens) which acts as the leit motif for the structure. Entire corridors and all the terraces sport the same jaali, through which the sunlight passes, throwing up shadows on the walls and the olive khareda stone floors. The jaali is one of two dominant Mughal features that Kerry Hill has exploited, the other being water. As in the Mughal palaces, water channels interweave through the public areas, and reflecting pools and waterfalls become a distinctive design feature in and around the spa and the restaurants. Hill says the resort design is “current, but filtered through a sieve of traditional values”. He says, “We prefer to build upon what is there and to contemporary our understanding of what it can be.”
The wide corridors and staircases, the high ceilings, the huge pillars and the minimal use of art — all in stone, and consisting of a few panels in relief, reproductions of some museum masterpieces, a gigantic stone elephant in the driveway, and lotus-shaped urlis for floating flower petals and lights — create a sense of understated elegance. The suites and rooms, similarly in earth tones, do away with fuss and clutter, so that the lines are clean; instead of drapes or blinds, screens roll out to provide privacy, some of them echoing the same pattern as the stone jaalis in dark wood. “We designed all of the interiors at Aman New Delhi including the furniture, most of which was produced locally,” says Hill. Glass panels separate the plunge pools from the rooms, and each room has a private terrace as well.
Aman New Delhi has several firsts to its credit — it is the only highrise Aman property, for instance; the only city hotel (or “resort”, as Treston insists), barring another Aman in Shanghai, and that is in the suburbs, not in the city centre; it is the only Aman to have two restaurants, both of them also open to city diners (Aman restaurants are otherwise exclusively for the use of resident guests); and it has television and wi-fi in its suites, something you’re unlikely to find in Aman resorts elsewhere. “We’ve had to do a lot of learning,” Treston says of the Delhi resort. Among them such things as managing laundry for a 67-room property in a city location — on average, Aman resorts have 35 rooms — making a trolley mandatory, for instance; elsewhere, Aman resorts will make use of the laundry going out on donkey-back or in bicycle carts, indulgences it could hardly afford to provide here. But guests might still be entertained by snatches of a flute player in some part of the resort, or the lady who does the flowers singing to herself: these, Treston believes, are the unexpected experiences guests look forward toThe restaurants are large too. The Aman restaurant serves Indian (Old Delhi Mughlai, Kayasth and Jain), Thai and Naoki cuisine in Japanese chinaware, Indonesia crockery, Italian cutlery and Swiss glassware. The Lodhi restaurant, spread over three levels, introduces Catalonian dining at two levels, and a tapas lounge at ground level, supported by an extensive wine cellar.
Though there are extensive gardens, the greenery is not profuse, part of the philosophy, Treston says, of keeping the lines clean and simple. The result is extensive use of bamboo and ficus. “The Aman philosophy embodies simplicity and a design aesthetic in which one material pays respect to another,” points out Kerry Hill. “If, like a large company, we had set out with a strategic plan for global development” — Aman has 21 properties around the globe — “I am afraid each property would have had an institutional sameness and not the uniqueness of design and experience that marks the Amans,” says Zecha.
No wonder the understated Aman New Delhi is also the city’s most expensive hotel. Rooms start from $550, with one bedroom suites at $1,050-1,250, two bedroom suites at $1,200-1,650 and the three bedroom suite at $2,200. And that’s just the summer rate. And no, you don’t get any discounts.
