Umaid Bhawan Palace, Jodhpur
Construction on Umaid Bhawan began in 1929 and took fourteen years to complete. The Maharaja of Jodhpur commissioned it partly as a famine relief project, employing around 3,000 workers from the region during a severe drought. What they built is one of the largest private residences in the world: 347 rooms across a structure that blends Indo-Saracenic domes with Art Deco interiors, all without a single drop of cement. The sandstone came from Chittar Hill, just outside Jodhpur, and the blocks were carved and fitted using a traditional technique called lime-surkhi mortar. The Taj Hotels group manages one wing as a hotel; the Jodhpur royal family still occupies another; and a third functions as a museum. Walking between those three zones, you feel the building's ambiguity, it is simultaneously a monument, a home, and a hotel, and it has never fully decided which.
