Stay at Arunachala

They say they feel Arunachala before they even see it. The road narrows, the noise of the town falls away, and somewhere past the last bend, the mountain here simply arrives, without any announcement. Old, unbothered, and watching. And this is exactly where the five villas of Nandhi sit, low and quiet against the earth. As if these villas grew there rather than were built.

The five villas are precisely set apart from each other, each one of them low to the ground, imperfectly curved and shaped from soil-based ferro-cement. The kind that keeps the heat out without a single air conditioner working overtime. Living roofs sit above you like the land simply decided to continue upward. It’s quite easy to forget you’re inside a building at all.

Here, the day isn’t structured for you. Not at all. By the end of the second day, you wouldn’t fail to notice how little you’re doing, and how full that little feels. You are waking up because the sky is changing its color. Not because of the buzz of an alarm. You are eating when you’re hungry, not sticking to any sort of schedule. Sooner or later, the realization hits: the mountain ain’t ask anything of you. It wants you to just stay there, be visible from almost every room, reminding you that stillness isn’t the absence of life. It’s the very essence and a pace of it.

That’s true that you’ll most probably leave Nandhi with fewer photographs than you expected, but there will always be a strange, specific memory. A memory of what stillness actually felt like in your body. For us, and people coming here, turns out, is the harder souvenir to come by.

Studio Nandhi

Notes from the hill — stays, spaces, tables and walks around Arunachala, written slowly and captured in time.