Amanbagh

Of the royal tiger hunts once staged in this corner of the Aravalli hills, Amanbagh has kept only the dinner. By the hotel's account, a nineteenth-century hunt ended with a meal in the jungle, and Jhilmil Bada, a mud-plastered platform, is laid to recreate it. The rest went up in 2005, to Ed Tuttle's design: pink sandstone under Mughal domes, and a colonnade running the length of a reflecting pool with green loungers along its edge. Inside, carved wooden screens stand between stone columns and a scalloped arch frames the way out to a terrace. The room to book is a Pool Pavilion, 203 square metres with a garden courtyard and a pool of its own.

Recommended for couples who want Rajasthan's ruins with a walled garden to come back to, and for families with children under twelve: a Pool Pavilion sleeps two of them with their parents, a wading pool sits beside the main one, and babysitting is free with a day's notice. The hills are for going out into, by jeep, camel, bicycle or Marwari horse. Bhangarh, half an hour's drive, was abandoned a generation after it was founded and is rumoured to be haunted, which has not stopped the hotel laying breakfast among its ruins. Back at the hotel the cooking is Rajasthani and Ayurvedic, from its own organic garden. Gwaadi, an open courtyard walled in earth, is where to learn the masalas, and for the Chhatri Dinner an old stone pavilion is lit with hundreds of diya lamps. Sariska Tiger Reserve, 45 minutes away, still keeps tigers on the maharajas' old hunting grounds; the hunting party now only gets to look.