Just a two hour’s drive from the ever-bustling and expanding sprawl of Mumbai—India’s second city—the Sahyadris Hills unfold with a cooler and less humid climate. For decades now, the region—also noted for its ancient forts and Buddhist caves—has been a popular weekend destination for city-dwellers in search of respite but, like the dense and crowded urban cores they’re escaping, it has also succumbed to rampant and unregulated development. Ironically, much of the natural beauty here has fallen victim to its fame. Such is the unfortunate fate of many sought-after resort areas in favorable proximity to a major city or conurbation.

Looking to maintain what is left of the verdant landscape and make it available to guests in a more responsible way is the recently completed Radisson Resort and Spa Lonavala.

Replete with several distinctive restaurants, events venues, and other premium amenities, the retreat embeds into its ‘hill station’ surroundings through its innovative architectural massing, materiality, and the implementation of climate-specific strategies inspired by the local architectural vernacular. The decidedly Brutalist yet emphatically site-responsive complex is a far cry from the antiseptic chain hotels that often feel out-of-place and inauthentic.

“The sense of open space of connecting to nature is contested by the building forms that emerge through the prescribed structural codes and densities,” says Kamal Malik, the founder the eponymously named, Mumbai-based firm responsible for the hotel’s design “The architecture emerges from the site, topography, from the region’s material history—black basalt and wood—and adapts to both flexible and fixed—public and private—programs.”

Malik Architecture’s comprehensive intervention incorporates reinterpreted architectural archetypes from the region: courtyards, verandahs, deep-shading, thick walls, and cross-ventilation. The main focus however is the surrounding nature. Monumental volumes give way to soaring apertures visible for numerous semi-indoor and semi-outdoor vantage points. All together, the scheme accommodates optimal natural ventilation, safeguards against heavy rain during Monsoon season, and protects against harsh sun rays.

Suites come with adjoining patios enclosed by operable slatted shading walls. The guest rooms occupy abstract-form buildings hovering above the ground. Shafts of natural light slice across these angular volumes and illuminate atriums that appear between.

“The feeling of a multi-storey building has been avoided by developing the ground as organic, free form public spaces with split level topographical connections,” Malik adds. “Extant forms—bastions and Large masonry walls—stepped courts, otherwise known as kunds—animate the built landscape.”

A rich earth tone palette, defined by many of the same substrate materials as the exterior, makes its way into the interiors but doesn’t overpower as the main attraction remains the carefully framed natural setting outside. There’s no superfluous decoration, just a sober deployment of ornamentation hinting at the local Maratha culture. Spacious guest rooms and suites are pared back with a calming modernist aesthetic only interrupted by fluted tambour-pattern feature walls and traditional carpets denoting the placement of beds.

Alongside numerous sports facilities including everything from a fully-equipped fitness center and steam room to archery and badminton fields, Radisson Resort and Spa Lonavala’s dining options include the quintessential Indian style Hirkani—with stations that allow guest to watch their food being prepared—and a series of pop-up haunts. Malhari is the go-to cocktail bar. The historic Tungarli Village situates right out the resort.

What: Radisson Resort and Spa Lonavala
Where: Lonavala, India
How much: Rooms starting at $137
Design draws: A site responsible destination embedded within the popular getaway Sahyadris region of western India with materiality, proportions, cuisine, and activities programmed in honor of the verdant nature in the immediate surroundings.

Go virtually on vacation with more design destinations right here.

Photography courtesy of Radisson Resort and Spa.

Simons ewig hungrige Katze findet einige Wege, um den Laptop seines Menschen zu zerstören, als Simon während einer Telefonkonferenz den Raum verlassen musste.

If you’ve ever tried to work with a cat in the room, this one’s for you. Working from home isn’t so peaceful with this keyboard warrior around!

(Direktlink, via Laughing Squid)

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I need to do an upbeat comic week one of these days. They all end with hooray.

For a few hours on Tuesday, Polymarket hosted a bet about the possibility of nuclear war in 2026. The market asked the question “Nuclear weapon detonation by …?” and racked up close to a million dollars in trading volume before Polymarket took the unusual step to remove the market from its website. It did not simply close down the bet, but it’s been “archived” meaning that a record of it no longer exists. It’s strange as many older and paid out bets remain on the site.

Pulling a bet like this is unusual and the company did not respond to 404 Media’s request for an explanation as to why. Word of the nuke bet drew wide attention online from critics already upset about Polymarket for its place in the depravity economy.

“I have not seen anything like this before,” Jon Wolfsthal, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama and a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told 404 Media. “As a citizen, it seems dangerous to enable people in power to place bets anonymously on things that might happen, creating an incentive to act on a basis of personal gain and not the national interest.”

Polymarket doesn’t often balk at bets on violence and war. There are multiple markets covering the wars in Ukraine and Iran and also many other bets about nuclear detonations. “Will a US ally get a nuke before 2027?” and “Russia nuclear test by …?” are both still actively trading. An older version of the “nuclear weapons detonation” is still on the site and did almost $3 million in trading before closing and paying out at the end of the 2025. It’s hosted a bet on the same question every year for the past few years.

The gambling market has been under fire this week after gaining a lot of attention for its various bets on the war in Iran. Gamblers spent more than $5 million betting on the question “Will the Iranian regime fall by June 30?” People have been caught manipulating war maps to cash in on frontline advances in Ukraine. And someone made $400,000 using inside knowledge to place bets about the capture of Maduro.

“How ghoulish. Especially given how much insider trading apparently goes on with current events bets,” Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian and creator of the NUKEMAP, told 404 Media.

Wellerstein said that betting on nuclear war isn’t unprecedented, but that it’s usually tongue-in-cheek and conducted by insiders. “The thing that immediately comes to mind is Fermi's ‘side bet’ that the Trinity test would destroy the atmosphere in 1945—which was a joke, as nobody would be able to collect if it had happened,” he said.

“A flip of this is in Daniel Ellsberg's The Doomsday Machine, in which he eschewed paying into a pension in the early 1960s because he thought the odds of a future nuclear war were so high that it was better to spend the money sooner rather than later. So another kind of bet, but a private one,” Wellerstein added. “And whenever experts give ‘odds’ on nuclear use (which the intelligence community does, apparently), they are to some degree indulging in this kind of impulse. But not for the hope of personal profit—usually it is because they want to avoid such an outcome.”

Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has repeatedly called the site “the future of news,” and has suggested that prediction markets give the public a more clear picture of events because money is on the line. The reality is that the financial incentives pervert reality. Nuclear war, it seems, was a bit too dramatic for Polymarket to host a wager on. But Polymarket has few moral qualms, has not told anyone why it "archived" the bet, and it’s possible it did so for some arcane technical reason and not because it got squeamish. Polymarket did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.