Taj Connemara

Vivanta by Taj—Connemara, Chennai is a five-star hotel in Chennai, India. It is a heritage hotel in Chennai. Classified under the Taj Group's business hotels section, the hotel is considered the oldest hotel in the city.HistoryThe property of Taj Connemara was originally a house bought by John Binny from The Nawab of Arcot in 1799. The property was later bought by T. Somasundara Mudaly and built as the Imperial Hotel in 1854 under the proprietorship of Triplicane Rathinavelu Mudaliar, renamed Albany in 1886 when it was leased to two other Mudaliar brothers, and re-established as The Connemara in 1890, named after the then Madras Governor during 1881-1886, Robert Bourke, baron of Connemara, a rural area in Counties Galway and Mayo in the West of Ireland, later becoming a Spencer's hotel. In 1891, Eugene Oakshott, owner of Spencer's, then a little shop near Anna Circle, bought the hotel and its nine acres to build a showroom. Oakshott wanted to give Spencer's a facelift, so he decided to build one of Asia's biggest departmental store. In the 1930s, James Stiven, director of Spencer's, modernised the hotel starting in 1934, and the modernisation was completed in 1937. It sported an art deco look when it was reopened in 1937. According to a hotel press release, the 1937 renovation, estimated at 575,000, boasted about its "cool refreshing air delivered through the newest air conditioning apparatus." According to the first published tariff of the hotel, the cost of a room on single occupancy was 10 with breakfast and that of a room with all meals was 17.80.