Bungalow on the Beach

About Bungalow on the Beach

Its Danish relics lend Tranquebar a curious, washed-out charm. The moment you enter its "Land Gate" you are transported back to another age and time.

As you traverse the grandly named King Street, the main street that leads from the gate to the beach, you pass a row of colonial structures, which includes the elegant 1701 Zion Church, and the more elaborate 1718 New Jerusalem Church, and the now tattered 18th-Century Danish Governor's bungalow. At the end of the line stands the newly renovated hotel.

The building was in a state of utter disrepair, with parts of the verandah having collapsed, when conservationists Francis Wacziarg and Aman Nath, who set up the Neemrana Group, came across it. It took two years of restoration to turn the building into a gracious hotel. But today, the building is as much an example of intelligent conservation as it is an evocation of the past, using as it does a minimum of carefully chosen vintage furniture, paintings and artefacts. Its high-ceiling rooms are named after old Danish ships and fitted with sheer single-colour floor-length curtains that billow like sails in the breeze.

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