28 Kothi

The five rooms at 28 Kothi are named Moon Stone, Sapphire, Spinel, Topaz and Peridot, which is about what to expect of a guest house dreamed up by a jeweller. Munnu Kasliwal meant it as a home for the creative people passing through Jaipur, and his son Siddharth, a ninth-generation jeweller at the Gem Palace, runs it now. Georges Floret, a French architect, built it in Civil Lines, the leafy quarter outside the walled Pink City: two storeys of yellow plaster, with deep overhangs and lattice set into the walls. Local craftsmen made the furniture, and the bathrooms are marble. In one bedroom the two arched headboards are edged in mirror and palms climb the wardrobe doors in paint, which is more to look at than a television. No room has one.

Recommended for couples and solo travellers who want Jaipur's forts and bazaars by day and a garden by evening, and for a family or a group of friends, who can take the whole house. There is no pool, so the garden does the work: daybeds on the lawn with striped bolsters, and brass bowls of marigold petals beside them. Breakfast is included, and Cafe Kothi's vegetarian cooking lands somewhere between India and the Mediterranean, served in the garden and on the terraces. Ask, and dinner is laid on the lawn by candlelight, with copper thalis and the marigolds again, this time as a runner. Sapphire is the suite to book, with a private terrace and the top floor to itself. Peridot, the single, has the communal terrace and a third of the floor space. In the dining room the sun comes through the lattice in pieces, the one pattern in the house nobody made by hand.