beyondbrics

Some of Asia’s urban hotels are renowned for their pools with a view. The Intercontinental in Kowloon offers stunning vistas of the jewel box that is Hong Kong’s office district across the harbour. The Fullerton offers an eyeful of Singapore’s cityscape.

The elegant 50m pool at the Aman in New Delhi, by contrast, keeps the hustle and bustle of India’s capital city deliberately out of sight with artfully created jaalis, or screens, inspired by Mughal palace architecture.

The aesthetic of the Aman Delhi, a Cinderella-goes-to-the-ball conversion of an existing property bought from India’s dowdy state-owned hotel company, could be described as Mughal minimalism.

This might sound like a contradiction in terms but not when you see Australian architect Kerry Hill’s version of it. The emphasis is on using beautiful indigenous Indian stone. In this hotel, the stones really do speak to you.

The pool [pictured above] itself has olive-coloured stone squares at the bottom. The occasional tedium of swimming laps is reduced by trying to guess if they are changing colour right before your eyes. The screens, meanwhile, do wonderful tricks with the light, mellowing the occasionally harsh strobe-like Indian summer sunlight. The screens create a wall between the pool and three synthetic grass tennis courts. If all these distractions weren’t enough, walking to and from the pool entails walking through corridors that double as a gallery for one of India’s foremost art galleries. The area around the lobby features oversized Indian art — a life-sized cow in one corner and a Brobdingnagian Indian woman’s head.

No other hotel in New Delhi can match the Aman for tranquillity. And where the still hugely popular and almost always full Taj hotel and Oberoi hotel have large under-utilised pools as well, they are the conventional acquamarine sort and do not allow outsiders to use them.

The Aman, by contrast, does allow members and has about 280 of them. It costs less than US$2500 plus taxes for an annual membership. This includes use of the gym and the tennis and squash courts. The Mughals, who knew a thing or two about laying out gardens and courtyards to keep India’s debilitating heat at bay, would have considered that a bargain.

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