Detailed Review
Located at an altitude of 2,600 meters (8,250 feet), Wildflower Hall is a picturesque 45-minute drive through forested hills from Shimla, the capital of Himachal Pradesh. The resort is a serene and relaxed getaway offering an experience of nature on a grand scale. It also provides an ideal base for exploring the Himalayan region.
One-time home of the British Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener and later a historic hotel, Wildflower Hall is set in 22 acres of beautifully landscaped grounds with a forest cover of over 3,000 trees. From its vantage point on top of a knoll, the hotel looks out onto a magnificent vista of rugged mountains, snowy peaks and cedar forests.
Independent Reviews
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"Picturesque hill station retreat with great views"
Wildflower Hall
By Justine Hardy
Lord Kitchener of Khartoum—it sounded so romantic to a twelve year old in an ugly chair, thighs sticking to hot plastic, watching monkeys screaming at each other over a flobby sandwich, surreptitiously thrown out from under her chair. That dust patch had once been one of the voluptuous lawns of his lordship. The many-layered triggers of that twelve-year-old imagination saw him along every path that she had been dragged along under the wide-girthed cedars before being presented with the bad sandwich on a broiling plastic chair. Lord Kitchener leased Wildflower Hall as his retreat and playpen in the Himalayas, a place to slip away to from the starched social strictures of Simla, the summer capital, with its tight collared and cuffed party scene that swished around the memsahibs’ skirts. He liked to play in ways that would have had the corseted mems screeching for their smelling salts. So, he got his bolt-hole, and that was the romance of it twenty-four years ago to me as my thighs stuck between the hot slates of the homogenous plastic mould chairs so loved of the HPTDC, the Himachal Pradesh Tourist Development Corporation, with their special ability to flobby-sandwichify so much that was formerly great and gracious. Then the Oberoi Group cast their eye over the potential of the dust patches and sighing swing doors, and, in tandem with their big project to rejig The Cecil in Shimla, old man Oberoi’s first gig, the group took on Wildflower Hall. It promptly burnt to the ground in 1993. The new place was built from dust patch up, and though they insist that the Wonderland tilty-roofed structure is right in tune with the lines and mood of the original rambling bungalow, it did not have even an echo of it to me. The old one had all those sighing door and meandering balconies and verandahs around just the two storeys, while the new Wildflower reaches up six floors into the mountain air with turrets and towers straight from Disney-does-the-Himalayas, with a whiff of Colditz on the pitched-roof side. And just to clear one pedantic moment, bungalow simply means big house, however many storeys, the Hindi-word-knicking Brits whipped it to make pretentious the flattened drabness of their retirement hell holes on the octogen-bingo-beat from Brighton to Bognor. The rolling twenty-two acres around still have the romance that they held for me almost quarter of a century ago, and one thing we know for sure: Oberoi rules the Indian hotel roost, so a new place comes with all the group’s style, most particularly their Banyan Tree Spa. Take a hot June dumped in the fetid furnace that is Delhi, the heat sucking at you. Pack you, pack your kids, get on a plane, in a car, on a train, yes, take the train, the Shatabdi to Chandigarh, and the Oberoi will pick you up from there and whisk you to Mashobra. The enervation recedes as you wind up into those sacred sentinels, unless you’re prone to car sickness, in which case you will be having a less than pleasant time studying the various litter-strewn verges. Chew raw ginger, it works a treat, and for morning sickness too, but I digress. Settle in, get a baby-sitter and pack the kids off on a Children’s Camp Out, a day-camping Oberoi wheeze for teaching the blessed ones the nuances of tent-pitching and outdoor survival, so handy and vital for the streets of Shanti Niketan and South Kensington. Then you book horses and ride out through the hills with a hamper to have under those spreading cedars. Libido revived, body weary, return and descend to the spa while the newly trained survival specialists wow it up in the kids’ Periwinkle restaurant. Go for the Spirit of Ayurveda, a three and a half hour special (sounds long but it’s only equivalent to a short Hindi movie). Exfoliation by rice, softening by rice, massage by Ayurveda on one of those gorgeous body-on-a-block wooden tables from the deep south. A marma facial follows on with all your energy points being primed, and your worry lines being banished, and a flower bath at the end just in time to kiss the eco-warriors goodnight. And all that spa stuff for the same price as a parking fine in the good borough of Capt. Congestion Ken. No comparison.
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