Jesus moment | Park Hyatt Hyderabad

I like my hotels like my clothes – larger than I should. Just as I am happiest in billowing black robes that make me feel as if I might be a high fashion warlock, so I like the gloss, anonymity, and flash of vast five-star properties. I have been to Vegas purely to marvel at the scale of the places on the Strip, and while I enjoy burning money on a roulette table, I take as much delight in staying somewhere that has more restaurants and bars than I could feasibly eat my way through during a stay. City hotels that become miniature cities themselves are my Umberto Eco chambers of delight.

He created buildings, largely with supercharged atriums, that took banality and made it sensational through scale

India does this kind of thing really well. It has to: It is one of the busiest hubs in the world for conference activity, and its hotels are relied on for plush layovers on the way somewhere even further. When I checked in to the Park Hyatt Hyderabad recently, it was sold out. The reception was busy but, this being India, there was an army of well-dressed staff waiting to take credit card deposits and issue room keys. Once past the front desks, I walked into a vast atrium that conjured up 1970s disaster movies of the highest calibre. At one end of the ground floor, sitting on the edge of a reflecting pool that runs the length of the space, is a 27-foot high white sculpture by architect John Portman entitled ‘Becoming’. It’s a sort-of-nude but caught mid-abstraction into a Henry Moore. It’s not great, but it’s effective. Balanced in front of a wonderfully retro curved staircase, surrounded by countless horizontal and vertical lines running across eight floors, it has impact.

I was at the Park Hyatt Hyderabad on my way back to London from the Andaman Islands. India is a nightmare for those who hate early flights. You really have no choice. Coming from Port Blair, I had a whole afternoon and evening at the Park Hyatt, and stayed for another day and night after, ahead of a violently early start the following morning. After two weeks on islands without wine lists, plagued with power cuts, and generally offering you a constant scattering of grit in the oyster of paradise, I wanted somewhere with a huge bedroom, giant bathtub, outdoor pool, and a maze of F&B, that I wouldn’t want to leave.

I dropped off my bags and went straight to Rika, which is Asian-everything. I ordered every variety of dim sum on a long menu. After so long on an island with the option of either a bottle of Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay for the same price I’d pay for a bottle of Pol Roger back in Europe, or a list of smoothies, I was thrilled to have choice in this department. It’s still not cheap, but it’s here, at about ₹10,000 (around £10 in post-Brexit basket case currency) for a glass of Indian white or red. The food was good, the music was a mix of weird and inappropriate early 90s acid house, and the service was typically Indian – omnipresent and always too much. If you’ve visited India a fair amount, you’ll know that the drill in fancy hotels is to ask the guest for their order before they’ve even touched the menu, then to try and serve them their food in a kind of bonkers silver service style, spooning the meal from platter to plate. When my waiter tried to spoon me my shumai from the basket, I rebelled: “Stop! That’s the most fun bit!”

Elsewhere at the Park Hyatt Hyderabad there’s the ground floor Dining Room, where you get the customary epic buffet breakfast, and which has regular themed dinners. When I was there, it was Kashmiri and it was very nice indeed. There’s also Tre-Forni, upstairs and across the atrium from Rika. If you squint, this could be a big, flash, Italian restaurant in the States. The chef does a good tortellini with duck ragu, and there are solid risottos and three ovens (hence the name of the place) knocking out pizza. The bar here is also a nice place to sit on a sofa with a negroni, or three.

I had a joyous time at the Park Hyatt Hyderabad because it was a big architectural surprise. I hadn’t, shamefully, heard of John Portman before I visited – the man whose name is attached to both that big white sculpture in the atrium and architecture of the hotel overall. When he died in 2017, The Architectural Review ran an obituary: “His hotels may have soft centres but the architecture of John Portman is as brutal as the late American capitalism that created it.” Rowan Moore, writing in The Guardian in 2018, said his legacy was about creating “Disneyland for adults”, and recalled that his Atlanta Marriot Marquis included a “homage to Liberace”, and that “his buildings became known for their ‘Jesus moments’, those times when, emerging from a deliberately understated entry into some architectural emulation of the Grand Canyon, a visitor would reliably exclaim, ‘Jesus’!”

Portman is best known for his work in Atlanta, where he spent most of his 93 years on Earth. He created buildings, largely with supercharged atriums, that took banality and made it sensational through scale – repetition warped in ways that make you wonder what you’re seeing. There are no glass lifts climbing up the interior atrium at the Park Hyatt Hyderabad, but they wouldn’t be out of place. There’s also a reason why this hotel might make you think of imperial phase disaster and dystopia movies – Portman created both the Westin Bonaventure in Los Angeles (which has featured in True Lies and Escape from L.A.) and the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, aka The Glass Tower in Towering Inferno. Portman created a consistent mood in his work. Paul Davies, writing in The Architectural Review, considers whether it might be called “neo-futurist”: “The last time I was in a ‘Portman’ hotel (the Hyatt Regency in Houston)… I was confronted by a gaggle of drunken young ladies dressed up as Snow White. I left the premises approximately twice. When you found the bar in those Hyatts, you stayed there; either too scared or too gobsmacked to do otherwise.”

Forget butler service and free transfers, this is precisely what I want from a hotel experience. C

Park Hyatt Hyderabad, Road No. 2, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, 50034
Hyatt.com