In the spring of 1880, a stone-mason named Velayudham left Madurai with twelve men, four bullock carts, and a sealed envelope of instructions written in a clerk's hand on behalf of His Highness Sri Brahadamba Das Martanda Bhairava Tondaiman. They were to build a summer house, on the eastern edge of Kodaikanal Lake, on a parcel of land that the British had granted the princely state of Pudukkottai a decade earlier as part of a treaty about elephants.
The walk took eleven days. The teak — twenty-two tonnes of it, milled in Munnar — followed by a different route, four weeks behind. The masonry began on the second of June. By the end of October the residence was roofed, glazed, and sealed against the first of the winter mists.
The royal family
The Tondaiman line is older than the residence by some five hundred years. The princely state of Pudukkottai sits in present-day Tamil Nadu — its court was famous, in the late nineteenth century, for the discipline of its administration and the openness of its rulers to British negotiation. The state acceded to the Indian Union in 1948.
His Highness used the Kodaikanal residence as the royal family's hot-weather retreat from Pudukkottai's plains. His son inherited it, and his son after that. The house has not, in five generations, been sold; it has changed hands only by inheritance. The current steward is Princess Radha Niranjini Tondaiman.
The architecture
The residence is colonial-Indian in plan and South-Indian in detail. The principal block is two stories of dressed stone, white-painted, with peaked tile roofs and pillared verandahs running its full length. The interior teak — ceilings, doors, mantels, the staircase — is original. So are most of the brass fixtures. The windows are deliberate: each lake-facing room is sized so the proportion of window-to-wall opens the view to the water without losing the room's intimacy.
In 2018 the Owner — Princess Radha Niranjini Tondaiman — began a restoration, working with a heritage architect from Chennai. The brief: restore, do not renew. Where the original could be repaired, it was repaired. Where it had to be replaced — half-perished window panes, a section of teak floor — the replacement matched the original exactly. The building today is closer in form to its 1880 commission than it has been at any point in the previous sixty years.
What the residence is not
It is not a museum. The library is read from. The kitchen feeds the royal family. The gardens are maintained by a four-person team who have known each other for twenty years. The objects on the walls — the antlers in the principal drawing room, the silver in the hall cabinet — are royal family possessions, not props.
It is not a chain palace hotel. There is no logo of any other brand on any surface of the property. There is no co-ownership. There is no plan to franchise.
It is, simply, a house that the royal family has decided to share.
