Our Founder Story

The boy was twenty-four and preparing to leave for London to study law. He was in his final year at St. Joseph’s College in Darjeeling, a hill station wrapped in cloud and tea, where the mornings smelled of pine and the evenings tasted of mist. He had his life mapped out: a law degree in England, a career on his own terms, a future that belonged to no one but himself.

Then his father died.

Hrushikesh Ray was a businessman, a patriarch, the steady centre of a prominent Odisha family. Overnight, Shri Dilip Ray was no longer a college boy with London dreams. He was the head of a family. He had six sisters. He had a mother whose prayers to Lord Jagannath every morning at four o’clock were always the same: that her son should never know grief.

London was cancelled. The law books were closed. At twenty-four, Shri Dilip Ray came home to Rourkela and stared at a life he had not planned for. He knew one thing with the kind of clarity that only comes from having no alternatives:

He would not work for anyone else.

Two years later. A summer afternoon. A car on a long highway between Chandigarh and Delhi. Shri Dilip Ray looked out of the window and saw trucks, hundreds of them, parked in a queue that stretched as far as the road allowed, waiting their turn at a weighbridge. He asked his driver what was happening. The driver explained. Shri Dilip Ray sat quietly for a moment.

Then he did the arithmetic in his head: fifty rupees a truck, hundreds of trucks a day. Rourkela had a steel plant. Rourkela had truck traffic. Within sixty seconds, he had his first business idea.

He invested one lakh rupees in a weighbridge on the Rourkela highway, and it earned thirty to forty thousand a month. A good start, and not enough. Weighbridges don’t build legacies. That weighbridge still operates today, forty-six years later.

The area was called Civil Township, the last point of Rourkela town: less inhabited, far from the centre, the kind of place people drove past on their way to somewhere else. In the middle of it stood a mango grove that belonged to Shri Dilip Ray’s family.

He invested twenty-five thousand rupees. He built a shed, put in a few chairs and tables, added thatched-roof enclosures for private dining, and hired a cook.

He called it Tandoor.

His grandfather Nilamani Routray, former Chief Minister of Odisha, was in shock. In those days a restaurant was not a respectable career for someone from a privileged political family; hospitality was not an industry young men of standing entered. His grandfather made his displeasure known.

Shri Dilip Ray stood his ground.

He took three thousand two hundred rupees on the first day, and within three months had recovered his entire capital. Families from the Rourkela Steel Plant began arriving. Cabins were added, then four rooms so he could stay on after late-night closings. Those four rooms became a party hall. The party hall became a banquet series.

The first cook who stood behind the counter at Tandoor in 1982 is still there. Same location. Different names on the building. But the same hands, the same recipes, the same mango trees overhead. The MAYFAIR story had begun, and its founder was twenty-eight years old.

Ten years passed. Ten years of building a restaurant into something larger, of learning the grammar of hospitality by doing it: not from a textbook, not from a consultant, but from the simple act of feeding people and giving them a place to sleep.

For his first planned hotel, Shri Dilip Ray chose Puri, the city of Lord Jagannath. He wanted MAYFAIR Heritage to feel like a hamlet rather than a hotel, a cluster of buildings that seemed to have grown out of the earth rather than been placed on it.

During site preparation, the construction team found something in the middle of the plot: an old Shiva temple. Small, weathered, ancient. The kind of structure most developers would move, or demolish, to make way for the building plan.

Shri Dilip Ray looked at the temple. Then he looked at the architect.

The capital city of his home state beckoned, and Shri Dilip Ray did what everyone around him said was irrational. He looked at the prime real estate at the centre of the property, the land any developer would have filled with rooms, conference halls and revenue-generating square footage. He decided to dig a lagoon.

Then he filled the grounds around it with vintage cars, a decommissioned aircraft, gramophones, old typewriters, pianos, maps, lithographic art and period furniture. His advisors questioned the financial logic. His accountants ran the numbers and counselled against it. His response, as it had always been and would always be, was to follow his instinct.

Today MAYFAIR Lagoon is one of the most photographed hotel properties in eastern India. The lagoon is its soul, the vintage collection its character, and the thirty-nine thousand six hundred square feet of event space built around the water is among the most sought-after wedding and conference venues in Odisha. The thing everyone said would fail became the thing no one can replicate.

Every Friday evening during his college years at St. Joseph’s, young Shri Dilip Ray would walk into town with his friends. The route took them past a grand colonial bungalow on the right side of the street, directly opposite the Governor’s House. It belonged to the Nazargunj Royal family, and every Friday without fail there was a party in progress. Music through the windows. Laughter spilling onto the road. The golden light of a life being lived fully.

The boy would stop, look at the house, and turn to his friends.

“One day,” he would say, “I am going to buy this house.”

They laughed. Every Friday, the same promise. Every Friday, the same laughter.

Twenty-one years later. 1995. Shri Dilip Ray was now a Member of Parliament and a hotelier with properties in Rourkela, Puri and Bhubaneswar. He received a call that a property was available in Darjeeling, travelled to see it, was unimpressed, and returned home to Rourkela.

The next morning, before he had even unpacked, the phone rang again. A different property: the bungalow opposite the Governor’s Mansion. The house from his college days. It was for sale.

There was no flight from Rourkela in those days. Within the hour Shri Dilip Ray was on a train to Kolkata, then a flight to Bagdogra, then a car through the night, up the winding mountain roads, through the fog and past the tea gardens, arriving in Darjeeling by early morning.

He met the owner. She wanted two crore seventy-two lakh rupees and an advance that same day. Shri Dilip Ray reached into his pocket, paid ten thousand in cash, and promised the rest within the month. That evening he called every friend from college. Every single one.

“I am calling to let you know that I purchased the house of my dreams.”

In 1997, MAYFAIR Hill Resort, Darjeeling opened: a five-star heritage hotel at seven thousand feet, where guests watch the sunrise paint Kanchenjunga gold from their windows. Nobody laughed this time.

Gopalpur-on-Sea was one of Shri Dilip Ray’s favourite places on earth. Whenever he visited he stayed at The Oberoi Palm Beach, a colonial property built in 1914 by an Italian named Signor Maglioni. He loved it so deeply that he would dream, quietly and privately, of owning it one day.

But Oberoi does not sell properties. Everyone in the industry knew this. Some things are simply not available, however much you want them. And then, one day, Oberoi decided to sell.

Shri Dilip Ray did not hesitate. Not for a day. Not for an hour. He acquired the property and began the painstaking work of restoring its colonial elegance: not rebuilding it, not modernising it beyond recognition, but bringing back what decades of wear had taken while adding the comfort MAYFAIR was now known for.

Today MAYFAIR Palm Beach Resort spreads across twelve acres of beachfront with a hundred and forty-one rooms, suites and villas, and sixty-seven thousand square feet of event space. It is, by any measure, one of India’s most distinguished heritage coastal properties. It is also the property that taught Shri Dilip Ray that some dreams are worth waiting for, and some arrive when you least expect them.

Not all MAYFAIR properties were built from scratch. Some were rescued.

MAYFAIR Manor at Jungpana, built in 1905, was once a colonial estate graced by Nepalese royalty. Set within the Jungpana Tea Estate in the Himalayas, it holds twelve suites with heirloom furnishings and working fireplaces, surrounded by pine forests, mountain streams and cascading waterfalls. By the time Shri Dilip Ray found it, it needed saving. He saved it, restoring it so carefully that guests today feel they have stepped not into a hotel but into a private home that happens to sit inside one of the world’s finest tea estates.

The Kalimpong property tells an even longer story. Founded in 1901 by David MacDonald, the estate stayed with the MacDonald family for over a century. It hosted His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It watched the entire arc of India’s modern history from its verandah. MAYFAIR restored its soul without erasing its memory, adding refined modern comforts while preserving every corridor that carried a hundred and twenty years of living history.

In Gangtok, the property was once the private residence of former Chief Minister Shri Nar Bahadur Bhandari. Spread across fifty-three acres of bamboo forest, it now carries monastery-inspired gold-accented doors, Sri Lankan gables and Odisha’s signature red-stone sculptures: a blend of traditions that should not work together on paper, but does in the hands of someone who designs by instinct rather than convention.

Architect N. Mahesh, one of India’s most respected resort architects with forty-five years of experience, put it simply:

At most hotel chains, landscaping is an afterthought. The building goes up, the rooms are fitted, the lobby is polished, and then someone plants a row of ornamental bushes along the driveway and calls it done.

At MAYFAIR, the plants arrive before the foundation is laid.

When construction begins on a new property, Shri Dilip Ray selects the species himself and has them brought to the site. While the structure rises, the saplings grow in a nursery on the same plot. By opening day the landscape is not newly planted; it is established, mature, as if the trees had been there longer than the building. Because, in a sense, they have. He does not call this landscaping.

He calls it creating a mini-forest.

The result is measurable. MAYFAIR properties hold micro-climates two to three degrees cooler than the land around them, through dense tree plantations, expansive green spaces and integrated water features. Guests feel the difference the moment they step off the driveway. The air changes. The temperature drops. The noise of the road disappears behind a wall of green.

There are things you should know about the man who built these hotels.

More than eighty percent of MAYFAIR’s employees, across all nineteen properties from Darjeeling to Goa and Gangtok to Raipur, are from Odisha. This is not incidental. It is policy, a commitment Shri Dilip Ray made to himself early on: that his business would give the people of his home state the chance to earn a living, to travel and to grow, wherever the hotels happened to stand.

In Bhubaneswar he established a centre where Odisha’s artisans and sculptors make work for MAYFAIR properties on a regular basis, providing sustained income and national visibility for traditional art forms that might otherwise have faded quietly from view.

At every MAYFAIR property you will find Odisha stone sculptures given pride of place. Pattachitra paintings. Handwoven textiles. The work of human hands from a state most luxury travellers have never visited, placed at the centre of hotels those travellers will remember for years.

You will also find a library. Not a shelf of paperbacks in the lobby, but a proper one: spacious, well-stocked, leather seating, the kind of room you would find in a home built by someone who reads. Because Shri Dilip Ray believes hotels should feel like homes. Not lobbies. Not check-in counters. Not sterile corridors with numbered doors.

From a shed in a mango grove to nineteen properties across Odisha, West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Goa and Maharashtra. From twenty-five thousand rupees to one of India’s largest single-owner hotel chains. From a grandfather’s disapproval to a legacy that will outlive them all.

Four more are coming: Sanctuary in Bhubaneswar, Vizag, Chilika, Shirdi. The mango grove is still growing.

The first cook from Tandoor is still at the original location. The Shiva temple at Puri is still exactly where it was found.

And every morning, before the sun rises, before the first guest stirs, before the world asks anything of him, a man walks through the gardens of his hotel, watering the plants he chose before the foundation was poured, tending the forest he planted before the walls went up. He has done this every day for forty-four years. He will do it again tomorrow.