How We Built Persimmon Farmstead

We built Persimmon Farmstead in 2021, two friends from IT who left corporate jobs after the lockdowns and settled in the Kullu valley. We started with one small orchard home at Badgran, 14 km south of Manali, learned by getting things wrong, then added a second home at Shanag. The food came first, always.

Why two office people moved to a valley

For years we did what a lot of people do. We wrote code, sat in review meetings, drank bad canteen coffee, and told ourselves the mountains were a two-week holiday, not a life. Then 2020 and 2021 happened, and like half the country we found ourselves working from laptops with no reason to be in any particular city. One of us had family ties to the Kullu side. We started spending longer and longer stretches up here, and at some point the return ticket just stopped feeling necessary.

We are not going to pretend it was a clean, brave decision. It was messy. We ran the numbers a dozen times, argued about it on drives between Manali and Kullu, and quietly kept our old skills sharp in case the whole thing folded in a year. What tipped us over was not a business plan. It was food. We kept eating in local homes, tasting siddu straight off a steamer, being handed a plate of rajma-chawal that had more character than anything on a hotel menu, and thinking: why does nobody serve this to travellers properly?

“Our one line to each other in the early days was simple. We want to make the food here a subject to be spoken in the town. Everything else, the rooms, the lawns, the bonfire, was built around that one sentence.”— A note from the hosts

Finding Badgran, the 14 Mile stretch

People assume you want to be deep in Old Manali or up near Solang for the views. We looked there and it did not fit. Old Manali is lovely and loud and packed in season. The far Solang road is stunning but you are a long, cold drive from a chemist or a mechanic. We wanted the harder middle thing: quiet and orchard, but reachable at 11 at night with a tired family in the car.

Badgran, at what everyone calls the 14 Mile bypass, gave us that. It sits on the Kullu-Manali highway about 14 km south of Manali town, opposite Span Resort, and it is genuinely one minute off the highway. You turn off the main road, the traffic noise drops away, and you are on an orchard lane. The rooms here catch the morning sun properly, which sounds like a small thing until you have shivered through a February morning in a north-facing room somewhere else. Guests mention the morning light more than almost anything, and that was luck as much as planning when we first stood on the plot.

To be clear about geography, because it matters when you are booking: we are near Naggar, near Old Manali, near Solang, but we are not in any of them. Naggar Castle is a drive. Solang is a drive. We will always tell you the honest drive time rather than let a listing pretend the snow is at our gate.

The mistakes we made building the first home

Here is the part most farmstay stories leave out. We got a lot wrong, and being honest about it is the whole point of this page.

• We planned rooms that were bigger on paper than they needed to be, then realised the budget for warmth, hot water and good beds mattered far more than square footage. Our rooms are cosy and compact. We call a cottage a cottage only when it actually is one.
• Our first winter, the water lines froze because we routed them the way a plains plumber would. We re-did the lagging and learned to trace pipes along the sun-facing wall. Now it is 24x7 hot water, but it cost us one very cold January to get there.
• We over-ordered on decorative nonsense and under-ordered on blankets. Second season we flipped that ratio completely.
• We thought a big fancy kitchen would signal quality. Wrong. What guests love is a small family kitchen cooking a short, honest menu well. We leaned into that instead of fighting it.

That last one is worth sitting with. Our kitchen is a family kitchen, not a hotel production line. On a full weekend that means the dal takes the time dal takes, and we will not fake a 40-item multi-cuisine menu we cannot cook with love. What we can do is put a plate in front of you that people drive back for. The reviews that say best food in Manali, and there are a good few, are the ones we are quietly proudest of, because that was the entire bet.

The food-first idea, in practice

Food-first is easy to put on a website and hard to actually run. For us it means a few concrete habits. We cook a tight seasonal menu rather than a phone-book of dishes. We use what the valley gives us, apples in autumn, greens through summer, and local grains for siddu and dham-style meals. We ask guests what they are in the mood for the night before, because a family kitchen can flex when a hotel kitchen cannot.

We also learned to sprinkle the local vocabulary in honestly, not as decoration. Siddu is a steamed wheat bun, usually stuffed, that Himachali homes make; dham is the traditional festive sit-down meal served on leaf plates. When a guest tries these for the first time and asks how they are made, that conversation over the table is exactly the town-talk we were after.

“We still call guests personally, often the same evening they arrive, to ask what they would like cooked. It is not a hospitality tactic we read in a book. It is just how you behave when it is your home and your kitchen.”— A note from the hosts

Then came Shanag

Once Badgran found its feet, we wanted a second home with a different character rather than a copy of the first. Persimmon Farmstead Shanag sits near Bahang, about 4 to 5 km north of Manali on the way toward Old Manali and the Solang road. It is higher up and closer to the snow line, so its whole personality is different from the quiet highway-side orchard at Badgran.

At Shanag we built with wood and stone to suit the place: wooden chalet rooms and stone cottages set on open orchard lawns with a lot of sky. In winter it is the one that feels properly Himalayan, snow closer, mornings sharper. Some guests want the easy access and morning sun of Badgran; others want the higher, wilder feel of Shanag. Having two homes lets us match the guest to the place instead of pretending one property is everything to everyone.

Both homes run on the same principles, because they came from the same two people. Both are family-run and pet-friendly, both have a farm kitchen, a bonfire, free wifi, 24x7 hot water, a travel desk and free parking. Neither takes an online payment. We work on request-to-book over WhatsApp because we would rather have a short conversation with you before you arrive than process a card and meet you as a stranger.

What we would tell someone building their own

People message us now asking how to do the same thing, leave the office, build a stay in the hills. We are not going to hand you a fantasy. Season is real: a winter road can ice over on the orchard lane by mid-December, the power can wobble in a storm, and a family kitchen on a full weekend is genuine hard work at 11 pm. If you build here, build for the cold first and the Instagram photo last.

But the good part is truer than we expected. There is a morning almost every week when the sun hits the orchard, a guest who arrived tense the night before wanders out with a cup of tea, sees the ridgeline, and just stops. That is the whole thing. We left two decent careers for those mornings, and five years in, we would make the same wrong-then-right decision again.

If you want to come see the mornings for yourself, the fastest way is a message on WhatsApp at +91 62306 45166 or +91 99999 75545, or an email to reservations@persimmonfarmstead.com. Tell us who is coming, which dates, and whether there is a dog in the car. We will tell you honestly which of our two homes will suit you best.