He’s the man who made the non-hotel an integral part of the Indian traveller’s itinerary. Synonymous with restoration in India, Aman Nath is the co-founder of Neemrana Hotels. What began as a journey to salvage Neemrana, a dilapidated 15th century fort in Rajasthan, has turned into a lesson on how to restore and resurrect ruined buildings.
Nath, the youngest founder-member of INTACH, has always been passionate about Indian heritage. How did he discover his calling? “Design was always a part of my being – an aptitude for origami, for painting, pressing leaves, shaping driftwood.” After earning a Master’s degree in history, Nath ended up joining an ad agency.
The designer believes that he doesn’t follow any particular design style or philosophy. “Perhaps the words ‘open’, ‘eclectic’, and ‘inventive’ could work. Many schools make you copy the masters. What a shame, that even in the free-flowing creativity of art, one should be shown a dotted path to follow. What could be worse than turning fresh students into sheep, in a cage called art?”
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A combination of many things led to his embarking on a career in restoration. “My love for history. The unmatched aesthetics of a monument hotel or of the colonial designs brought by the Portuguese, the Danes, the French and the English... Each non-hotel has a subtle difference in how it uses space on the different topographies it was built on — the Himalayas, the Sahyadris, the Arabian Sea coast or the beaches of the Bay of Bengal,” he explains.
Today, he believes that the “Neemranification” of old buildings has literally shown the way to thousands of people and given them practical courage to restore. “The liability-to-viability cycle has been shortened in their minds just by these demonstrations. What began as a passion has grown into a mission,” he says.
He thrives on the challenges of bringing back to life a dead building, of adapting a design to already existing spaces. “This marriage of the old and new leads to a new energy. It lets one wake up amid 500-year-old walls with quaint doors, windows and bathrooms that don’t resemble any other. Frequent visitors to our properties who try different rooms find themselves hugely rewarded with each experience. Each room is different; you’ll never find an identical room 232 or 322 in an otherwise perfectly stylish corridor-style hotel,” he says.
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Many designers would do away with a lot of the old, but Nath tries to restore with minimum intervention. “When the property demands more, and we have the space and the scope, we also go beyond restoration and reconstruction to extensions in the same style and materials. There are no hard and fast rules – it has to be an intuitive decision to enhance the experience of the property,” he explains.
Does he have a favourite property? “One tends to get obsessed with the property one is working on. The Verandah in the Forest, the Bungalow on the Beach, the Cliff House at Ramgarh – how does one choose?”