English architect William Ward Marret designed the palace in the shape of a scorpion, its two stingers spreading northward as wings while the main building occupies the body. The kitchen, Gol Bangla, Zenana Mehal, and harem quarters stretch to the south. Sir Viqar-ul-Umra, Prime Minister of Hyderabad and uncle to the sixth Nizam, had traveled widely in Europe, and the architecture shows it -- Italian and Tudor influences merge throughout the structure. The foundation stone was laid on 3 March 1884, and nine years of construction followed before the prime minister moved into the Gol Bangla and Zenana Mehal in December 1890, personally supervising the final finishing work on the Mardana portion. The cost was so staggering that it required borrowing from the Bank of Bengal.

Sixty rooms and twenty-two halls fill the palace, each competing to outdo the last. The library features a carved walnut ceiling modeled after Windsor Castle's and once held one of India's finest Quran collections. A marble staircase with carved balustrades supports figurines holding candelabra at intervals, leading visitors upward through increasingly elaborate spaces. The State Reception Room overwhelms with frescoed ceilings and gilded reliefs. In the Ballroom, a two-ton manually operated organ -- said to be the only one of its kind anywhere -- sits as evidence of a collector's ambition that recognized no practical limits. The jade collection is considered unique in the world, and forty Osler chandeliers, each bearing 138 arms, constitute the largest collection of Venetian chandeliers under one roof. The dining hall seats 101 guests, a number that speaks to the scale of entertainment the palace was built to host.

After the Nizam claimed Falaknuma for himself, he transformed it into a guest house for visiting royalty. King George V and Queen Mary stayed here. So did Edward VIII and Tsar Nicholas II. Each arrival justified the palace's existence as something more than private indulgence -- it became Hyderabad's statement to the world, proof that the princely state could receive European monarchs in surroundings that matched anything they knew at home. The last important guest was Rajendra Prasad, President of India, in 1951. After that, the palace fell quiet. Decades of disuse followed, the marble dimming and the chandeliers gathering dust in empty halls. The Nizam family kept the palace as private property, closed to the public until the turn of the millennium.

In 2000, Taj Hotels began the painstaking work of restoring Falaknuma to its original grandeur. A decade of renovation followed, requiring craftspeople who could match nineteenth-century techniques in marble, stucco, and gilding. The restored palace opened as the Taj Falaknuma Palace hotel in November 2010, giving the public its first real access to interiors that had been private for over a century. Walking through today is walking through the ambitions of Hyderabad's most powerful families: the Paigah nobles who built it, the Nizams who claimed it, and the modern hospitality industry that saved it from decay. Bollywood has noticed too -- films including Radhe Shyam and K.G.F: Chapter 2 have used the palace as a backdrop, drawn by the same dramatic setting that once attracted tsars.