"My grandfather planted the first row in 1961 because the slope was too steep for anything else. We are still picking from forty of those trees."
Four generations, one slope.
The Sood family has farmed this hillside since Partition. Apples came in 1961 out of necessity — the gradient defeated everything else — and for fifty years the crop went down the hill to Shimla and no further.
In 2019 the family stopped spraying, and the orchard took three difficult years to recover. Those years changed the plan. If the land was going to be farmed slowly and honestly, it could hold people the same way.
The first four rooms opened in 2022, built from Kangra slate and deodar cut on the estate. Fourteen more followed. The orchard still pays for itself; the rooms simply mean nine village families now work here all year instead of six weeks.
Five rules we have not broken yet
Experiences before rooms
Nobody remembers a thread count. They remember the morning they picked their own fruit.
The season decides
We do not run the same programme in January that we run in September. The mountain sets it.
Slow is the point
Silent mornings until nine, one dinner sitting, no televisions. Guests fight it for a day and then stop.
Local, or not at all
Forty kilometres for food, nine for staff, zero for the deodar the rooms are built from.
Small on purpose
42 keys on four acres. We have turned down every plan to build more.
The mountain was here first.
Eighty-one percent of our energy is solar. Every drop of rain that falls on the estate is kept. No single-use plastic has entered the property since we opened, and the kitchen composts back into the rows within three weeks.
Thirty-one of us, twenty-six from the valley
Nobody here commutes more than nine kilometres. That is the single fact we are proudest of.
