Oberoi Udaivilas Review: The Lake and the Palace Across the Water

The Lake Palace Hotel sits on Jag Niwas Island in the centre of Lake Pichola — the seventeenth-century royal pleasure pavilion that the Mewar royal family built for their summer refuge from Udaipur’s heat and that became, when converted to a hotel in 1963, the most famously romantic hotel in Asia and the specific image that the word “Udaipur” produces in the international imagination. The Lake Palace is visible from the Oberoi Udaivilas’s waterfront terrace across the lake. This view — the white marble palace rising from the water in the afternoon light, the Aravallis behind it, the specific shimmer that the lake’s surface produces in the wind — is the primary reason that the Oberoi’s architects positioned the property where they did and designed the terrace to face in the direction it faces.

The Oberoi Udaivilas opened in 2002 on the lake’s eastern shore — a complex of domed and colonnaded structures built in the Mewar architectural tradition’s marble and mosaic work by craftspeople from Udaipur’s own artisan community whose skills the Mewar royal court developed and maintained for centuries. The cupola above the main dome, the jali screens that filter the light from the lake, and the specific hand-laid mosaic of the lobby floor — these are not manufactured luxury hotel ornament. They are the craft tradition of this specific city applied to a building commissioned to express it, by craftspeople for whom the skills are familial and inherited rather than acquired and performed.

Lake Pichola and the Boat

The Oberoi’s private boat — the wooden vessel that the hotel maintains for the lake crossing to the City Palace ghats, the sunset cruise across the lake, and the specific pleasure of approaching the Lake Palace from the water rather than viewing it from the shore — is the activity that most Udaivilas guests conduct on the first afternoon before the itinerary has established its pattern. The lake at sunset, with the City Palace’s towers and the Lake Palace’s white facade and the Aravallis’ silhouette all visible simultaneously from the midpoint of the crossing, produces the image that the Udaipur photographs have been reproducing since colour photography arrived in Rajasthan. Being on the boat at the moment when the light does the thing the photographs document is the experience that the photographs are trying to convey and that the boat places you inside rather than outside.

The Private Pools

The Udaivilas’s villa configuration includes private pools — the pools within the courtyard gardens of the individual villas, oriented to receive the lake light and positioned to allow the swimmer to look across the courtyard’s high walls to the Aravallis beyond the city without the lake’s direct view that the terrace pool provides. The courtyard pool is the private version of the lake experience: the same light, the same temperature, the same still water, but enclosed in the architectural privacy that the Mewar haveli’s courtyard tradition established for the female members of the royal household and that the Oberoi’s villa design has adapted for the couple whose honeymoon requires the specific privacy that the shared terrace pool cannot provide.

The Chameli Mahal Spa

The Chameli Mahal Spa — the treatment rooms whose name references the jasmine whose fragrance the Rajasthan garden tradition uses as its most specifically sensory element — provides the Ayurvedic treatments that the Oberoi’s health programme draws from the classical Indian medical tradition’s understanding of the body’s constitutional types and the botanical resources whose specific applications the tradition prescribes. The Udaivilas’s specific location in Rajasthan’s Mewar region provides the specific botanical resources — the ashwagandha from the dry hillsides, the rose water from the local distilleries, the sesame oil from the desert agriculture — that the Ayurvedic preparations use as the regional expression of a medical tradition whose botanical specificity is one of its most practical characteristics: the treatment uses what grows here because what grows here is the best available resource for the preparation the treatment requires.

Udaipur the City

The City Palace complex on the lake’s western shore — the largest palace complex in Rajasthan, the accumulated construction of twenty-two rulers of the Mewar dynasty across three centuries, whose zenith and nadir and the artistic production of its various periods are all present simultaneously in the museums and the courtyards and the working sections of the complex that the royal family continues to occupy — is the primary cultural destination from the Udaivilas and the site whose specific complexity the Oberoi’s heritage guide interprets with the depth that the eight centuries of Mewar history require to make comprehensible. The guide’s knowledge of the specific rooms and their specific history — which maharana commissioned which marble screen, which artist produced which miniature painting, which courtyard was the scene of which negotiation with the Mughal court — is the knowledge that transforms the palace visit from a sequence of beautiful rooms into a coherent historical narrative.

Practical Details

87 rooms, suites, and villas. Room-only and full-board. Maharana Pratap Airport Udaipur approximately 30 minutes. Rates from approximately $700-$1,000 per night. The monsoon (July through September) covers the lakes and the surrounding landscape in the green that the Aravallis’ vegetation produces when the rain arrives — the most visually lush season and the most authentically Rajasthani in the sense of being the season that the royal court organised its own movements around.