Taj Malabar Resort & Spa, Cochin

The Hotel

The Taj Malabar occupies the southern tip of Willingdon Island — the artificial island the British engineers Lord Willingdon, Sir Robert Bristow and the Cochin Port Authority created between 1920 and 1936 from dredged silt to give the Cochin harbour a deep-water port. The hotel's original block, the Heritage Wing, opened in 1935 as the Malabar Hotel: a sloped-tile-roofed colonial structure on the seaward point with twenty-eight large rooms, deep teak verandahs and a sweep of lawn down to the harbour wall. The Tata Group's Taj Hotels acquired the property in 1981 and added the Tower Wing in the 1990s; the comprehensive renovation of the Heritage Wing completed in 2010 brought the original block back to a contemporary five-star standard while preserving the colonial-tropical envelope intact.

The 95 rooms divide between the two buildings. The 28 Heritage rooms in the original 1935 wing are the headline category: high ceilings, hand-painted Athangudi-tile floors, four-poster teak beds, and either a balcony or a private verandah onto the lawn and the harbour. The Malabar Suite is the named two-bedroom corner unit in the Heritage Wing with three water-aspect windows. The 67 Tower Wing rooms (renovated 2018) are smaller and more contemporary, with the better high-floor sea views and modern bathroom-spa fittings; the Junior Suites on the upper floors of the Tower handle the corporate stay and the wedding parties. Every category has the saving feature of the property: a window or balcony that frames the Arabian Sea, the harbour entrance, or the backwaters to the east.

The dining is one of the strongest hotel programs in South India. Rice Boat — the signature restaurant — is a working Kerala seafood kitchen housed in a moored-replica Alleppey kettuvallam (the traditional rice-barge), serving the karimeen pollichathu, the meen moilee, the prawn pollichathu, and the duck mappas that constitute the Travancore-Cochin classical menu. Pepper is the all-day multi-cuisine room; the Jiva Spa runs Ayurvedic and contemporary treatments in a separate pavilion; the Sundowner — the cocktail terrace on the seaward lawn — runs as the property's signature pre-dinner room every evening from five-thirty through eight, set to the harbour's working sunset and the silhouettes of the Chinese fishing nets across the channel.

What the Malabar sells is a position that no contemporary Kerala hotel can replicate: the southern point of Willingdon Island, with water on three sides, the Cochin Port pilot boats working the channel beyond the lawn, and the ten-minute ferry across to Fort Kochi (the historic Portuguese-Dutch-British quarter with St Francis Church, the Mattancherry Palace, and the Pardesi Synagogue). The Cochin International Airport is 50 minutes by road north; the Ernakulam Junction railway is 15 minutes; the Alleppey backwaters launching is 60 minutes south. For a Kerala arrival or departure, for a Cochin business stay, for a wedding-and-honeymoon week paired with a kettuvallam houseboat in the backwaters, or for the cultural-heritage stay over the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (December–April every other year), the Malabar is the state's most considered single address.

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