The house
Some places are built.This one was kept.
In 1983 Calangute was at a hinge. The village had been fishing and farming for centuries, the first travellers had found the beach two decades earlier, and the charter planes had not yet come. That is the year this hotel opened, and the year on the sign has not needed changing since.
The photographs on this page are of the house as it is today. We have put them through a treatment that looks the way our old prints look, because the old prints themselves are still in an album and not yet scanned. When they are, they will hang here.
The building
Read the house
like a Goan house.
Most of what a visitor photographs here has a name and a job. The covered seating at a Goan entrance is a balcão: it exists so the family and the street can talk without anyone stepping inside. The turquoise on our columns and balustrades sits in a long Goan habit of strong colour; under Portuguese-era convention, plain white was reserved for churches, so the houses answered in blue, ochre and green.
The steep roof is Mangalore tile, machine-pressed red clay, pitched to throw the monsoon off fast. The walls under the lime wash are laterite, the local iron-red stone that cuts soft and hardens in the air. None of this was decoration. All of it was engineering for this exact coast.
The rooms
Painted by hand,
one at a time.
At some point somebody in this family decided the seven rooms should not match, and then kept going: flowering branches painted straight onto a gold wall in one room, a full wall of flowers on pink in another, deep red in a third. It was not a design system. It was a house being looked after by people who liked it.
We have kept it that way, and the rooms page shows every photograph of every room rather than the three best angles.
The name
Why Golden Eye.
The man who opened this hotel in 1983, Michael Mascarenhas, chose the name himself, and the mark that goes with it: an eye between two coconut palms, a wave underneath. He ran the house first, and his son runs it now. That is the entire corporate history.
We know the other Golden Eye. Ian Fleming’s estate in Jamaica has the films; we have the sunsets, and we were probably watching them first.
The sign, the trademark and the founding year are the family’s own. Everything else on this page you can walk past and touch.