A Palace of Canvas in the Thar

A camp with a bloodline

The design takes its cue from the royal caravan sites of Rajputana, and the borrowing is sincere rather than themed. In 1974 Tejbir and Malvika Singh travelled to Jaisalmer to film The City that Jaisal Built, a documentary the family credits with introducing this medieval city and its havelis to the world. In 2009 their son Jaisal and co-founder Anjali Singh opened The Serai here, what the Singhs describe as the first tented camp in this western corner of Rajasthan. This is not a brand parachuted into the desert. It is a family returning to a landscape it had first filmed a generation earlier.

Canvas and Jaisalmer stone

Twenty-one tents stand across the estate, hand-stitched canvas in soft, muted colours on bases of local Jaisalmer stone, rising to a royal encampment with pools and pergolas of its own (the full run of categories is on The Serai stay page below). Inside, the quiet tell is the finely crafted writing desk with its bespoke stationery. This is a camp that expects you to sit still long enough to write a letter.

Days of sand, nights of song

The Thar is vast beyond sense, and the camp's best outing treats it with due respect. You leave by jeep through desert villages, swap to a camel, and crest the golden dunes at sunset with sundowners waiting. Back at camp the Manganiyars play. These are the traditional bards of the western desert, with a lineage the camp traces back thirteen centuries, and the family says they first performed for the Singhs in the 1960s. Hearing them sing of love and war under the starlit sky would justify the journey on its own.

Dinner, if you ask, is laid on your own private dune amid flickering lanterns. Mornings belong to the spa, set within a walled garden at camp, where the treatments use organic, Ayurvedic products, or to the organic farm, which breeds a rare indigenous cattle breed (the camp's own description) and where you can watch the morning's eggs being collected before the chef turns them into a farm-to-fork breakfast.

The golden city, kept at arm's length

Jaisalmer Fort, the Golden City's UNESCO-listed heart, which the camp describes as India's only living fortress, is close enough for a guided visit among intricately carved havelis and ancient Jain temples. But the real cleverness of The Serai is in the distance it keeps. The city stays where it belongs, forty kilometres over the horizon, while you head back to camp for the hush.

"... the hush of the dunes feels like an invitation to rediscover stillness," say Anjali and Jaisal Singh of the place they built. For once, a founders' own copy reads like understatement.