What heritage actually means, and when it means draughty
Heritage is not a rating. It is a description of the building, and the building was not built for you.
What it usually gets you: courtyards, thick walls that stay cool without air conditioning, stonework nobody could afford to commission now, and a sense that you are inside the city rather than parked beside it.
What it sometimes also gets you: small windows, uneven floors, a bathroom retrofitted into a space that was not a bathroom, heating that was never installed because nobody needed it, and stairs. A lot of stairs, with no lift, because you cannot put a lift through a four-hundred-year-old wall without ruining the thing you came for.
None of that is a fault. It is the deal. But in December in Rajasthan, a beautiful unheated stone room at six in the morning is cold in a way the photographs do not convey.
So the question to ask is never "is it heritage". It is: how do you heat it, where is the room, and how many steps. Anybody good will tell you cheerfully.
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