Press Kit
Curious Cat Cottage
A boutique stay in Naggar, Himachal Pradesh, for people who travel with intention.
By the fourth month of driving around Himachal Pradesh looking for a place that didn't exist yet, Paakhi A. Tyrewala and Kanishk Godha had nearly stopped believing it did. Then the road bent into a village called Naggar, and they stopped the car for no particular reason, and didn't get back in for a long time. That instinct turned out to be right. Curious Cat Cottage stands on the spot where they got out.
Before Naggar, there was a lot of not-Naggar. Sissu. Bir. Jibhi. Valley after valley, village after village, each with something right and something that didn't fit: a view without a road, a road without quiet, quiet without any character to speak of. The search went on long enough that the place they were picturing started to feel invented, like they'd have to build the idea of it from nothing rather than find it sitting somewhere in the hills.
Naggar didn't announce itself. It just had a quiet that didn't apologise for itself, history at every turn (the Nicholas Roerich estate a short walk downhill, a 500-year-old fort, temples older than the fort), and, unexpectedly, enough good cafes that they could picture actually living there. They stopped looking that day.
Curious Cat Cottage has two founders, in equal measure.
Paakhi built her career on knowing exactly what a space should feel like before it exists. As a filmmaker, she directed Pahuna: The Little Visitors, produced by Priyanka Chopra's Purple Pebble Pictures, and the short film Kajal. Years of walking onto sets and reading a room in seconds, what belonged, what didn't, what was missing entirely, turned into the instinct that shaped every corner of the cottage.
Kanishk spent years as a software engineer, moving between cities, never quite settling. The work was fine. The life felt borrowed. The one thing he knew for certain, the whole time, was that he loved hosting people, feeding them, making sure they had the best bed in the house even if it meant he didn't.
What followed was slow and almost entirely handmade. Every piece of furniture is custom built. The curtains, the lights, the door knobs, even the paint on the walls, is custom mixed to a colour that didn't exist in a can. Nothing bought off a shelf if they could help it, and most of it built by the two of them, argument by argument, until it looked right.
Curious Cat Cottage opened in January 2026: five rooms, a specialty coffee cafe, a library, and a bonfire that gets lit most cold nights. Guests tend to arrive planning two nights and leave having rebooked for a week.
Naggar is a village on a ridge above the Beas river in the Kullu Valley, Himachal Pradesh. Once the ancient capital of the Kullu Kingdom, it sits 26 km south of Manali at 1,760 metres and moves at a pace that the rest of Himachal has mostly abandoned.
The Nicholas Roerich Art Gallery and the artist's preserved home are a 10-minute walk downhill from the cottage. Naggar Castle, a 500-year-old fort with valley views, is 5 minutes downhill. The village has a growing community of independent cafes, artists, and long-stay travellers.
It is, as guests regularly put it, the Manali they were actually looking for.
High-resolution images are available for editorial use. Please credit: Curious Cat Cottage, Naggar.
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