Royal revelry Travancore style

Kochi: Want to celebrate the New Year in a royal style? Come to the Travancore Heritage Resort. Perched on a cliff overlooking the Arabian Sea, the resort offers a panoramic view of the Kovalam beach an ideal setting to say adieu to the year 2001 while the sun vanishes into the horizon, painting the sky with myriad colours.

The resort has 45 independent villas that have the architecture of old palaces and traditional Kerala houses from Central Travancore and the nearby Tamil Nadu. While the reception lobby comes straight from the 150-year-old Valiyamadom palace owned by the erstwhile Edapally royal family, the dining hall is a replica of the dining hall of a 120-year-old Chettinad house in Tamil Nadu.

The 10-foot-high, 20-foot-wide wooden gate leading to the property was till recently the main door of the nearly 130-year-old VJT Hall, an architectural landmark in the heart of Thiruvananthapuram. The resort, to be thrown open next month, has cost over Rs 8 crore.

I spent more than a million rupees buying, transporting and reassembling the traditional Kerala architecture, says Chacko Paul, the promoter of the resort. I am basically a relic hunter. With the traditional Kerala architecture vanishing fast, I felt the best way of preserving it was through a resort.

Paul was assisted by architect T M Cyriac, who has recreated the dying Kerala architecture at several places in the state and outside. This is the third heritage property that Cyriac has designed. Cyriac claims that this is a heritage resort in its real meaning because concrete has been used only for the construction of the conference hall and the swimming pool.

"For the other few properties that I have designed, I had used a mixture of traditional and modern architecture. But the design of this resort is based entirely on traditional architecture," he says. We employed over 200 carpenters for days together to construct the buildings. In a way, we contributed to the revival of this craft, he says.

The ayurvedic centre, where tourists can be treated to this ancient Indian system of healing, has been built with special mud bricks. We will have our own herbal garden, and the oils used for ayurvedic treatment will be extracted from the plants grown on it, says Paul.

While Paul has chosen traditional architecture for his resort, he has employed state-of-the-art techniques for the disposal of wastes. The waste treatment plant being installed will generate manure that will be used to feed lawns. Paul is confident that tourism will pick up soon. The post-11 September recession is a temporary phenomenon.