Building on the hillside: how The Madar Lake Resort in Udaipur is taking shape in stone

Above Madar Lake, a short drive from Udaipur, a hillside is slowly turning into a resort. The Madar Lake Resort & Spa is a 155-key Hilton hotel on a site of about 7.5 lakh square feet, with roughly 2.3 lakh square feet of built-up area. At the moment the slope is being cut and the first masonry walls are going up. We want to share what the brief asked for, the one idea that organised the whole plan, and why we chose to build it the way Udaipur has always built: in load-bearing stone.

The brief and the slope

The client wanted a resort an international operator would be happy to run, with the room modules, back-of-house, fire and service planning that a brand like Hilton expects. At the same time, the site was not a flat plot. It was a hillside with a lake on one side and the city in the distance on the other. We could have levelled it and built a block. We chose instead to let the master plan follow the contours.

That decision settled almost everything else. Arrival, banquets, the spa and the service areas sit at the bottom of the slope, where trucks and cars can reach them easily. Guests check in there and move up the hill by golf cart, leaving traffic and noise behind. Every villa is placed individually on the slope so that each one looks out either at the lake or across the planted hillside towards the city. No room faces the back of another.

Why stone, and why load-bearing

Udaipur is a stone city. Its palaces, havelis and ghats were built by masons who knew how to make walls that carry their own weight and stay cool through a Rajasthan summer. We wanted the resort to belong to that tradition rather than sit on top of it. So the walls at Madar Lake are load-bearing stone masonry: structure and skin are one. There is no concrete frame hidden behind a thin stone veneer. The wall you touch is the wall holding up the roof.

This matters for three practical reasons. Thick stone walls have real thermal mass, so rooms warm and cool slowly, which helps the air-conditioning load in a climate that swings from hot days to cool nights. Local stone, cut and laid by local masons, keeps work and money in the region and shortens the supply chain. And raw stone with deep joints does not need to be painted or re-clad; it weathers. Our intention is that in ten years the buildings will look as if they grew out of the hill, with rain and sun doing the finishing for us.

Building this way on a slope also asks for patience. Each terrace has to be cut, retained and drained before a wall can start, and the masonry is set out by hand rather than poured. That is the stage we are at now: hillside cutting and the first walls. It is slower than a frame, but it is the stage that gives the resort its character.

What this means if you are planning a resort near Udaipur

If you own land on the hills around Udaipur, or on the approach to Mount Abu or Kumbhalgarh, the lessons from Madar Lake carry over. Work with the terrain rather than against it; a contoured plan costs less in earthwork and gives every room a view. Keep vehicles at the arrival level and move guests up gently. Build in the local stone, so the hotel ages into its setting instead of looking new and then old. And bring the operator's technical standards in from day one, so the romance of the site and the discipline of the brand are designed together rather than fought over later.

We have carried the same approach to our hillside work elsewhere, including the AC Hotel by Marriott in Dehradun and a second hillside resort in Udaipur. If you are thinking about a hotel on a slope, we are happy to walk the site with you.

Genre of Design is an architecture and interior design studio in New Delhi, working on hotels, homes and healthcare across India since 2009. See The Madar Lake Resort & Spa and our hotel architects in Udaipur page.