The Italian-Gothic palace next to the Aina Mahal was commissioned in 1865 by Maharao Pragmalji II and designed by Colonel Henry St Clair Wilkins, an English military engineer. Its Corinthian columns, marble statuary, oil-painted gallery and high bell tower are all out of scale with the Kutchi town around it, and that is part of the strangeness of seeing it.
The 2001 earthquake brought down chunks of the structure and damaged the bell tower, but a slow restoration is under way. Several rooms — the durbar hall, with its dusty stuffed-animal trophies, the gallery of portraits, the half-collapsed staircase — are open to the public; visitors can also climb to the upper levels of the bell tower for a panorama of the old town. Combined ticket with the Aina Mahal.