Our story
Every family has a few days it talks about for years. Aroha is a place for those days: one building where the people you love can celebrate, eat and sleep under the same roof.
The day before
Some have come from another city. Some have not seen each other since the last wedding. Check-in opens at 2:00 pm, and by evening a Family Suite Room is doing what family rooms do best: bags by the door, four or five people in one room, and nobody in a hurry to sleep.
That is why the rooms matter as much as the hall. A celebration starts the moment everyone is in the same place, and here that place is one building.
The arrival
Every big day has a first photograph, and it is often taken here. The entrance is dressed for the occasion, and guests come up the front steps in their best clothes, a little late and very pleased to see each other.
Then the room opens up: crystal chandeliers overhead, a patterned floor underfoot, and a stage that past weddings here have covered with a ceiling of flowers.
The evening
Every family has one. So the food is cooked in-house, from menus with room for everyone at the table: vegetarian and non-vegetarian, North Indian mains, and a pizza bar the children will find first. The Experience menu brings in Delhi's own street food, with a gol gappa station and chaat, and ends with kesari jalebi and rabri.
The plates matter, but they are not really the point. The point is the long table, the uncle with the same old story, and the cousins sitting together for the first time in years.
The late hours
This is the part that never makes it into the album. The last song ends, the hall empties, and nobody has to find a driver or the way back across Delhi. The rooms are in the same building.
The elders go to bed. The cousins find a sofa and keep talking. And the couple has the Super Deluxe, the only room at Aroha with a full working jacuzzi bath tub, and the first quiet hour of the whole day.
The morning after
Check-out is by 12:00 pm, which leaves the morning for the part no one plans: a slow start, last night's photographs passed from phone to phone, and everyone retelling the evening as if the others had not been there.
Then the goodbyes, which in most families take about forty minutes.
The next one
A wedding leads to a first anniversary. An anniversary leads to a first birthday. Someone gets engaged, someone turns sixty, someone simply wants everyone in one room again.
We would like to be there for all of them. There is a room for two for the anniversary, a Party Hall for the birthday and a banquet hall for the next wedding in the family, all at the same address. By then, you will already know the way.