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The House · No. 01
A king's manor
A king's manor
the family chose not to lose.
Around 1850, the Kadathanad Royal Family — who ruled the northern stretch of what is now Kerala — built a manor house at Bilathikulam, on the quiet edge of Calicut. It was laid out as a nalukettu: four wings around an open central courtyard, the way the region's important houses had been built for centuries. Open to the sky. Open to the monsoon. Open to the slow ritual of an evening lamp.
A century and a half later, the house came down through the family to Dr Srikumar. By then it was old, and tired, and the easy decision would have been to pull it down and start again. For a while, that was even the plan.
They chose, instead, to keep it — and to spend two years making it well again, exactly as
it had always been.
The restoration was slow and faithful. Teak beams re-pitched into clay tile. The polished red-oxide floors that hold the cool of the monsoon long after the monsoon has gone. The carved doors, the deep verandas, the planter's chairs where an entire afternoon can pass without your quite knowing where it went.
When Dr Srikumar and his wife, Dr Neetha Srikumar, opened the house in 2003, they did so as doctors rather than hoteliers. Both keep busy modern medical practices. But they believed the homestead itself — its proportions, its garden, its silence — was the first medicine, and that the clinical work was best left to ayurveda. The Government of Kerala has since recognised Harivihar with its Green Leaf accreditation. Guests have come from eight countries to sleep in its five rooms.
Harivihar means abode of the divine. The house is plainer than that name suggests, and a good deal quieter. Both, again, are the point.
