Madikeri, Coorg
Cardamom House
Three bedrooms on a small estate that still dries coffee in the yard. Leave a note and the cook comes at eight. Otherwise the kitchen is yours, and it is a good one.
₹18,500 / night
Open these dates
Private houses · India
Where the
weather stays.
Four whole houses, in Coorg, Kumaon, Wayanad, and a quiet court in north Goa.
Cardamom House · before sunrise
The idea
A key, a kitchen, and a morning that is yours.
We look after a few houses and almost nothing else. The linen is already warm from the window. Where there is a hearth, the fire is laid. Coffee comes from the slope you can see from the bed.
The fog usually lifts by ten. The day can start after that.
- 04 houses
- 02 night minimum
- 01 key for the whole house
The houses
Four houses, on purpose.
A working estate, a pine ridge, a valley veranda, a laterite court. A fifth would have to earn the key.
Mukteshwar, Kumaon
Ridge Cottage
Two rooms of stone and pine. A deck, two chairs, and a blanket that lives outside because the evening is the point.
₹22,000 / night
Last room these dates
03 — Vythiri, Wayanad
The Long Veranda
Four rooms along one table. Dinner is laid when the light drops into the valley, and the estate keeps talking after the plates are cleared.
₹16,800 / night
Open these dates
Assagao, Goa
Cashew Court
Laterite, a frangipani, and a stone basin that keeps the court a degree cooler. The sea is a short drive when you want it.
₹24,000 / night
Open these dates
Ziro
The valley keeps its own year.
Lower Subansiri, Arunachal Pradesh. The Apatani, Tanii in their own speech, farm a flat of rice between pine hills. The weather here is not a backdrop. It is the work.
The fields
Rice and fish in the same water.
An Apatani plot holds paddy and fish together. The bunds are walked, the water is shared, and the same field feeds people twice. This landscape, and the villages that keep it, sits on UNESCO’s tentative list as the Apatani cultural landscape. Hong, Hari, Bulla, Hija, Dutta, Mudang-Tage: each has its own ground, and its own turn.
The women
Marks of a generation, not a costume.
The women in this photograph wear tiipé, the facial tattoos, and yaping hullo, the nose plugs. Those marks belong to older Apatani women. The practice was stopped in the 1970s, and women born after that do not have them. What did not stop is the cloth, the clan, and the year’s work. When the village has something to do in public, the line is still white and red, and heavy with beads.
March
Myoko is friendship said out loud.
The villages take Myoko in turn, through March. Babo poles, tall and dressed, go up on the ceremonial ground. Households host the people they are bound to, and then they are hosted in return. There is rice beer, meat, visiting, and a sequence of rites that is not shortened for an audience. Myoko ties the year, the clan, and the neighbours. It is not staged for people passing through.
In July comes Dree, the agricultural rite: a plea that pests, blight, and hunger stay out of the standing rice. Between those two, the valley is mostly at its own work.
September
The music festival is a guest.
Since 2012, the Ziro Festival of Music has put independent bands in the valley for a few days in late September. It is not Myoko and it is not Dree. People come for the music, walk the bunds, and drink apong, the rice beer, made from what is growing behind the stage. Then they leave. The millet in this photograph was standing during the 2019 festival. The field was not planted for the weekend.
The house
The granary stays apart from the fire.
A traditional Apatani house is woven: bamboo, cane, and a floor raised off the damp. The granary is kept apart from the hearth, which is how a fire stays a fire. Pine and bamboo do the rest. The houses we let, in Coorg and Kumaon and the rest, are not these. This one belongs to the valley.
Photographs. The two landscapes were given for this page. Wedding in Hija, 2006: Doniv79, CC BY 2.5. Myoko, March 2023: The Hagez, CC BY-SA 4.0. Millet during the Ziro Festival of Music, 2019: Arun Katiyar, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bamboo house: Anand Explore, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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The morning
Breakfast is the plan.
Behind Cardamom House, before the fog lifts.
Journal
Notes from the houses.
12 September · Coorg
Leave before the estate starts its bikes.
The path is short and worth the damp. After nine it belongs to the day’s work.
28 August · The cook
A neighbour with a key.
She lives down the path and cooks when the slate says so. Dinner is a sentence, written the evening before.
2 July · The kitchen
What we leave out.
Salt, good oil, a pan that heats evenly, and the coffee. You should not have to hunt for a thing.