Old,Palace,restored,and,conver travel,insurance Old Palace restored and converted into a Heritage Hotel in R

Like any American, traveling occasionally is just what I love doing and I bet you share the same stuff with me. But traveling does not mean that you would be safe. Escaping from our job and other stressful activities is just something that w Torres del Paine is among the biggest of Chile’s national parks, occupying almost 600,000 acres (242,000 ha) of land in the south on the border with Argentina. It is also among the most important, receiving a significant proportion of domes

As one drives towards the world-famous Ranakpur Jain temples in south Rajasthan, built by a minister of the legendary Mewar ruler Rana Kumbha, one is struck by the beauty of the Aravalli ranges. Now adding to the beauty of the Ranakpur temples and the Aravallis is the Fatehbagh palace, a majestic 25,000 sq ft structure standing in an area the size of three football fields. Located on the banks of a river the square-shaped, light biscuit-coloured palace with its majestic arches, intricately carved pillars and pavilions, beautiful domes and an exquisite fountain in the foreground presents a picture of breathtaking beauty. Fateh bagh is no ordinary palace. Taking the help of just local artisans and without involving any qualified architect Jitendra Singh Rathore, 38, its current owner, a heritage hotelier and a scion of a local Rajput family, has transplanted the palace from the spot it stood 50 km away and recreated it piece-by-piece almost in the same design it had at the old place. Today, less than two years after Rathore began the work, Fatehbagh is perhaps one of the first instances of a palace being transplanted.For 200 years Fatehbagh-the new name of the palace given by Rathore- stood as "Ravla Koshilav" at Koshilav village, 50 km from Ranakpur. Two years ago, Rathore and his wife Gayatri Kumari, 35, got to see the beautiful but dilapidated palace as it was about to be dismantled by its owner, a Mumbai-based Rajasthani merchant. The merchant had bought it three decades ago from Rao Chiman Singhji, the former Thakur (nobleman) of a principality called Chanod. Fatehbagh Palace The husband-wife duo, who have been in the heritage hotel industry for years, simply couldn't let the palace be lost forever. Says Rathore: "My heart beat fast when I saw the attempts to dismantle it. An inner voice told me I shouldn't allow it to happen." And they took the risky decision of tearing down the entire palace and recreating it on the land they owned in Ranakpur exactly as it stood at Koshilav and then transforming it into a heritage hotel. It was a stupendous task that required grit no less than skill and enterprise and, above all, money. Rathore had a fair amount of all of these.He first secured the contract for dismantling the palace. Then he took a friend, Mohanji Kumavat, a building contractor dealing with Rajput architecture, to Ravla Koshilav and took his advice in chalking out a plan. With Kumavat's help he came up with his own grand plan on how to dismantle the palace and transplant it in Ranakpur. First he drew A A rough architectural plan of each structure of the palace. Next he gave colour-coded numbers to each structure. It meant mentioning the colour (based on the original colour) and number on each structure/stone/wooden piece so that these could be easily put together during reconstruction. The total number of these pieces in stone slabs, columns, pillars, pavilions, brackets, arches, wooden pieces came to a staggering 65,000. The reconstruction work was obviously more challenging than the dismantling. It virtually meant a larger-than-life jigsaw puzzle with thousands of pieces of beautifully carved sandstone, some of them weighing more than a ton. But the saving grace was that medieval sandstone structures are so built that each piece fits into the ones adjacent to it through a lock-and-key system grooved in them. So, once dismantled they fit in place again if the pieces are put together properly like in a jigsaw puzzle. And Rathore had done an elaborate job of numbering the structures and pieces so that he could put them together. "An inner voice told me I shouldn't allow the palace to be lost."Jitendra Singh Rathore, owner of Fatehbagh and heritage hotelier There were other questions too. The basic design of the old palace had to be maintained and yet a few changes were required to be made. Kumavat came into the picture once again. He drew up the plan and Rathore got a computer-aided design made on the basis of that. A team of 50 men along with a civil engineer was selected by Rathore from amongst the best in Udaipur for the task of rebuilding the palace. It included Farooq Khan, an expert in old Rajput style painting and painting restoration work who has worked with Taj Group hotels. Others were Suresh Yadav, a marble floor expert, and a team of skilled persons, Amrit Luhar, Lokesh Sharma and Suryaprakash Mali, all of whom have worked in the Indian section of a top class museum in Singapore. The civil engineer hired for the job was Hemant Jain.The big draw in Fatehbagh are the chattarpattas or floral motif crowns, which Rajput rulers of Rajasthan allowed noble men to have carved when they accomplished some great feat. There were 65 chattarpattas in Ravla Koshilav beginning from the entrance of the palace and donning the walls, windows and doors. They reflect the most intricate carving work in which even the folds in the leaves are visible.Another attraction in the palace is an extensive hall facing the front garden, which stands on 24 pillars and is embellished with 22 arches and a lotus-shaped fountain hall. A noteworthy structure is the perforated jharokha or pavilion fitted on to the zenana (ladies apartment) atop another hall at the palace's rear. It is called "Suraj (Sun) Gokhla" as it allows the morning sunrays to pass into the zenana through the jali and ensures that outsiders don't get a view of the inside. The extensive 60 ft by 25 ft hall on which the jharokha stands has galleries on both sides atop it to allow the ladies to see their men transacting business in the hall below.There were times in the past two years when Rathore and his wife were almost beaten by the challenge and thought of shelving their plan. Like when the artisans could not fit in as many as 13 jharokhas because of some blunder in numbering them at the time of dismantling. Bringing in the superior Sompura experts (Sompura is a caste which deals in stone architecture in western India) to do the job would have cost them over Rs 2 lakh. So Rathore took one long breath, laid all the parts in the open space before the palace and looked closely at each one of them. After an exercise of over a week he could fit in all the 13. Says Rathore: "Fatehbagh has turned me into an expert of Rajput architecture but one without a formal degree."Rathore is circumspect when you ask him as to how much he has spent on the work. "Quite a bit", is how he responds. But a rough estimate is that he has sunk in over Rs 2 crore.The Udaipur-based HRH Group of Hotels of Arvind Singhji Mewar has offered to take Fatehbagh on lease on a good annual return. The offer came from Arvind Singhji after he visited the palace last month and was captivated by its beauty. It seems Fatehbagh will live up to its name of being a Garden of Victory. Fatehbagh Palace, Rankapur Ranakpurhttp://www.fatehbaghranakpur.com Article Tags: Heritage Hotel, Fatehbagh Palace, Ravla Koshilav, There Were