The families who stayed
Most Indian palace hotels were sold, converted, or handed to hotel chains that stripped them of everything except the architecture. Gondal went a different way. The Jadeja Rajput royal family of Gondal still lives in the Orchard Palace, a late-19th-century riverside property that takes paying guests into a wing of the family's actual residence. You eat breakfast in rooms where the Maharaja's personal Rolls-Royces, a collection of fourteen, assembled between 1908 and 1967, still housed in a private garage on the grounds, once rolled past the windows. The family is present. That is the point.
