Royal revelry Travancore style
By James Paul | 17 Nov 2001
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.
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