When terrorists entered the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower heritage wing and sprayed the grand staircase with gun fire, the Sea Lounge and Ballroom on either side were devastated. In the centre of the staircase, the iconic hotel’s founder Jamsetji Tata looked on stiffly. But throughout the entire ordeal, the marble bust of the man remained unscathed.
No doubt, the Taj has intentionally made the process a meticulous one. Before starting, it looked at benchmark hotels around the world like the Peninsula in Hong Kong and George V in Paris. Designers and contractors were chosen by their previous experience with the hotel, but were given briefs and had to compete for those projects. Ergonomical inputs also came from management staff. The Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee visited often to make sure Taj was preserving its architecture.
Suite Success
March will also see the opening of what Taj’s most pre-eminent guests are waiting for — the suites. Sixteen themed suites have been massively redone, many renamed. The Presidential Suite, for example, has now become the Tata Suite, and expanded to include three bedrooms, a conference room, living room, dining room, and spa.
Will guests mourn the changes to the suites in which they’ve often stayed? “Whenever there is a makeover you will lose a part of what was old. Ten to 12 years back when we redid the hotel, there was a strong reaction of ‘what have you done?’ But people accept that we have to keep introducing new things to keep it current, as long as you don’t lose the soul or essence of the place,” says Kang.
To ensure that patrons would be satisfied, the hotel staff went over years of customer comments and took the opinions of their regulars through an informal feedback process. “There is the old guard who wanted to retain what was there, but the customers’ average age is getting younger, so we were guided by both,” says Kang.
New suites have also been added. Most anticipated is the Ravi Shankar Suite, dedicated to the classical musician who used to jam out with Beatle George Harrison in that very room. The room will include Shankar’s old sitar, art work from his favourite artist Jamini Roy, and memorabilia items like concert programmes, album covers and photographs. Other new suites include the Gateway of India Suite and Maratha Suite.
Designing the suites while running a fully operating hotel presents its own challenge, says Jacob of Archetype. Many times workers had to manually piggyback material and debris up five floors of narrow staircases so as not to disrupt patrons. The suites also required an immense amount of co-ordination between the international and local designers, which required videoconferencing and time difference planning.
Matters of the Art
The art restoration process, under the care of Mortimer Chatterjee of Chatterjee and Lal Gallery, which has been an art consultant for the Taj for many years, has also been a meticulous one. His task: To see which of the Taj’s 4,000-piece collection were destroyed, which could be restored, and which works they could bring out anew that the public had never seen.
(This story appears in the 18 December, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
Extraordinarily well written
on Dec 14, 2009