The Rooms, and the Guests Who Painted Us

A house that keeps getting added to

Devendra Garh did not arrive finished. It is a family house on Rani Road that has been added to in stages, by the people who live in it and, more than once, by people who were only staying. That is the sort of thing any property would say about itself. In this case there are two specific events behind the claim, both from the spring of 2024, and both easier to describe than to summarise.

Five rooms, and what each was trying to be

There are five rooms. Three look at Lake Fatehsagar and two look at the garden. Each was worked on separately rather than rolled out as a set, which is why they do not match, and they were never meant to.

The Maharaja Suite is the gold room. Yellow walls with a stencilled border running under the ceiling, arched niches worked in white plaster above the bed, a chandelier, and a sitting area that turns it into a suite rather than a bedroom. It is the most formal room in the house and the one that sets the tone for the rest.

The two Lake Durbar rooms are named for their colour and take the same idea in opposite directions. The blue one is pale and bright, with a cushioned window seat built into the corner where the two lake windows meet. The green one is deeper and quieter, with a carved headboard set into a scalloped arch and a window seat of its own. Both face the water.

The Super Deluxe and the Deluxe face the garden instead. The Super Deluxe is the larger of the two and the one families take, white walled and plain, with an embroidered elephant hanging above the bed. The Deluxe is the smallest room in the house, and the quietest.

The room a guest designed

In early April 2024 we posted a room we had just finished, and credited it, in our own words at the time, to the interior designer Lori Goldman. She was a guest here. That is the whole of the story we can tell honestly, and it is unusual enough on its own. Someone who does this professionally stayed in the house, looked at a room, and then designed it.

What that left behind is not a house style imported from somewhere else and dropped in. It is a room that looks like it belongs in this building, which is the harder of the two things to do and the reason we still point at it. Working with what a house already is, rather than against it, is a decision somebody has to make deliberately.

Then they painted the house

Twelve days later, in the middle of April 2024, Lori Goldman and Jonathan Goldman gave us a hand painting of the front of the house. Watercolour and ink on paper, in landscape, with a handwritten note left in the corner of it addressed to the Devendra Garh family.

It is an accurate drawing, which is what makes it worth a second look. The front elevation is all there: the four bracketed jharokha windows on the upper floor, the pierced parapet along the roofline, the arched niches painted blue at ground level, the recessed central entrance, and the vintage car parked across the frontage. Two flowering trees frame it, which is generous of them, and the whole thing sits on a strip of green with the name written underneath in a hand that belongs to nobody in this building.

Why we still tell this one

Guest books fill up with kind sentences. They are all appreciated and none of them are evidence of very much. A painting is a different kind of object. Someone took the building apart carefully enough to draw it, and that takes hours and attention that nobody owes a place they paid to sleep in. Then they carried the paper here and left it.

We are not going to claim this happens all the time. It happened twice, from the same two people, in a single spring. It is why one of these rooms looks the way it does, and why there is a sheet of watercolour paper in this house that we would not sell. If there is a point to be made about the rooms, it is not about square footage or thread counts. It is that people have gone to real trouble here because they wanted to, and a house that guests keep adding to is a different sort of place to stay than one that was finished before you arrived.