The property of Taj Connemara was originally a house bought by John Binny from The Nawab of Arcot in 1799. named after the then Madras Governor during 1881–1886,
Robert Bourke, baron of
Connemara, a rural area in
County Galway 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." The tower block and linking pool was designed by architect
Geoffrey Bawa in 1974, and the work was completed in 1977. The hotel saw two renovations in 1990 and 1995. In 2008, historian S. Muthiah wrote a book on the heritage of the hotel,
A Tradition of Madras that is Chennai—The Taj Connemara, Although the building was purportedly 200 years old by the turn of the twenty-first century, dating back to the original garden house bought by John Binny, according to Muthiah nothing of the old structure remains. The oldest part of the hotel is that built in the 1880s and 1890s. The hotel closed on 1 November 2016 for a major makeover to re-create the theme of its early past and reopen as an intimate high-end luxury hotel. Aiming at recreating old menus and cuisines, the renovation would retain only the Verandah and Raintree restaurants, refurbishing all the rooms, lobby and banquet halls to look more like the hotels early years. The renovation would be made by the Mumbai-based engineering consultancy Structwel Designers and Consultants Private Limited. as the Taj Connemara. The renovation took 22 months, cost 900 million Rupees, and involved 1400 workers. The Art Deco façade and interiors are the hotel's original features, including wooden carvings sourced from the 16th and 17th century temples of Mahabalipuram. Given its centuries-old background, the hotel boasts some historical snippets: • The stone pillars in the hotel's Raintree pathway and the wooden carvings in the grand staircase wall, both of which date back to the 16th and 17th centuries, are from old temples of
Mahabalipuram. • The lobby has a
grand piano that dates back to 1922, which used to be played in the ballroom in the evenings during the post-war era, and is still played on weekdays. • Nagavelli well, located in the hotel, never dries up even during the peak of summer when all other wells in the city dry up. • The Lady Connemara Bar & Lounge is the city's first licensed bar. ==Location==