Chettinadu Mansion

The mansion was built in 1902, one of the Chettiar houses of Kanadukathan. Deshadan, a Kerala hotel group founded in 2000, opened it in 2005 as its second property, describing it as the heritage palace of the erstwhile Chettiars. The group's own brochure says the house has been kept without any change to its structure.

There are twelve rooms, eight in the main building and four in the heritage building next door. The floors are Italian marble and the furnishings are wood. A colonnade of slender pillars runs round the open courtyard, and above it a gallery of blue columns with gilded capitals and a gilded balustrade looks down under a wooden ceiling. Rooms are air conditioned, with carved wooden beds and doors, ochre and green dados and striped rugs.

Lunch is Chettinad cooking in the Bojana Dining Hall. There is an outdoor pool and an ayurveda centre, and the house arranges bullock cart rides, cycle tours and village tours to the other mansions. Trichy and Madurai airports are each about two hours away.