Step inside ₹200 crore royal residence in Hyderabad: Shaped like a scorpion and home to 'world's longest dining table'

This ' ₹200 crore' Hyderabad palace has a 108-foot dining table for 101 guests and a billiards table whose twin sits in Buckingham Palace — take a tour.

High above Hyderabad, 2,000 feet up a hill, sits the extraordinary Falaknuma Palace — translated as 'mirror of the sky' in Urdu. In a joint YouTube video shared on August 21 by Curly Tales and Mashable India, actors Dino Morea and Zoya Afroz took viewers on a tour of the legendary estate, now the Taj Falaknuma Palace.

The video traces Falaknuma Palace's journey from a grand private dream to its role as the prized residence of the sixth nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Mahbub Ali Khan.

A palace shaped like a scorpion

The history of Falaknuma is a saga of royalty and an unexpected twist of fate. The story begins not with a king, but with his deputy. In 1884, Nawab Sir Viqar-ul-Umra, then prime minister of Hyderabad and brother-in-law to the nizam, commissioned British architect William Ward Marrett to build something Hyderabad had never seen: a palace in a hybrid Italian and Tudor style, laid out, as seen from above, in the form of a scorpion with its stingers outstretched.

Inside Falaknuma Palace

Throughout the video walkthrough, Dino and Zoya guided viewers through the palace's celebrated chambers and priceless artefacts. The most famous is the dining hall. At 108 feet, the rosewood table is believed to be the world's longest dining table, set with 101 green chairs under glass chandeliers. The room was engineered for power as much as for dining — its acoustics reportedly allowed the nizam to speak in a low voice at one end and be heard clearly at the other.

Then, there is the grand staircase. Carved entirely from Italian marble, it sweeps upward, lined with classical statues and oil portraits of European royalty and Hyderabadi nobles — a deliberate statement that this Deccan court saw itself as global. Off it lies the library. Its ceiling is not an homage to Windsor Castle; it is a direct replica, hand-carved in walnut, designed to mirror the library at Windsor. Below it sit countless rare manuscripts and first editions collected over decades.

A few doors down is the billiards room, home to one of only two tables of its kind ever made. Its twin, according to palace lore shared during the tour, sits in Buckingham Palace. And then there is the 'Jade Room'. Once used to host world leaders and dignitaries, it was the repository for the nizam's famed collection of jade, jewels and objets d'art. Stained glass, frescoes and a low, intimate seating plan made it both a treasury and a conversation chamber.

The tour also showed the private quarters. The 'Begum Suite' — the queen's apartment — remains preserved as an exemplar of Hyderabadi luxury, where rich textiles, European furniture, and Deccan craftsmanship coexist without contradiction.

More than a hotel

What the video captured, beyond the marble and rosewood, was Falaknuma's refusal to be a museum. At dusk, as documented by the actors' video, the palace stages a 'Nawabi Qawwali Mehfil' on its terrace — Sufi devotional music performed as it would have been for guests a century ago, the city lights flickering 2,000 feet below. It is this continuity that distinguishes Falaknuma from India's other palace hotels. It is not just preserved. It is performed.

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