A human reason for building the place.
The easier decision would have been to build another weekend destination.
KIKI is a highly specific, personal response to how hospitality and wellness should intersect. Rather than providing a generic biography, this page outlines the fundamental intentions behind the project directly from the founder.
Why KIKI?
Because of what the land already is, and what it already does.
There is mountain presence on one side and cultivated, flower-growing country around it. The ground is not flat. It falls, and water already knows how to travel across it. Trees stand where they stand. Between dry summer, the monsoon and the greener months that follow, this is not one place. It is three.
All of that could have been treated as a nuisance and levelled into something easier to build on. The contour, the existing trees, the views, the way water moves and the small changes of climate across the site are the first layer of architecture. Before asking where a building fits, ask what the land is already doing there.
This is western Maharashtra. Stone, earth, rain, local planting, agricultural memory, the smell of wet soil. The landscape is not a backdrop here. It is the climate, the material and the seasonal author of the place.
Why build a wellness retreat?
We have become very good at taking breaks. We have almost forgotten how to recover.
A drive out of the city, a beautiful room, a pool, a spa appointment, a late checkout. For a few days life looks different. Then you return to the same body, the same rhythm and often the same exhaustion. The break was real. The recovery never happened.
That gap is the reason for this. Recovery has to be considered from the beginning, as part of how a place works, rather than added to a stay afterwards as one more facility. It is why this is a retreat and not another weekend resort.
I want to be careful about what that means. We are not claiming to cure disease. We are not building a hospital and we are not replacing qualified medical care. The product is not a room. It is a different rhythm for a few days.
Why not build a conventional resort?
There are already many weekend properties in these hills. Villas, camps, pool properties, weekend stays. They answer a different question, and there is nothing to gain by making one more of them.
What is missing is not comfort. It is coherence. Wellness is usually a facility, something booked for an hour between breakfast and dinner, while arrival, food, movement, rest and sleep are sold separately and rarely designed to agree with each other.
I am wary of the word luxury because of what it has come to mean. A level of finish, a longer list of things added to a stay. It says nothing about how a room feels in the afternoon, or whether you slept. A room built to impress for ten minutes is tiring by the third day, because everything in it is still asking for attention.
Comfort is not the enemy of this. Good bedding, careful bathing, generous food and privacy all help a guest settle. What changes is what the days are built around. A holiday asks what you want to do today. A retreat can ask, more gently, what you need today.
What does wellness mean to you?
It is a plain word and I would rather keep it plain. Wellness here means recovery. Not a cure, not a medical treatment, not a promise about your health.
Most of it is unglamorous. Sleeping properly several nights in a row. Eating simply and enough. Walking. Being outdoors. Less noise, less light, fewer things asking you to respond. None of it is a breakthrough on its own. It works because it repeats.
The rest is the place itself. The temperature of a wall. The sound of water before you see it. What the ground feels like after rain. Whether there is shade where you need it. Whether you can sit somewhere without being expected to order anything. The version I want most is the one where this is felt before anybody explains it.
There is also no single way to feel well. One guest arrives needing sleep. Another needs movement before anything else will land. Nobody should feel behind for being new to meditation or unfamiliar with the food. And a few days here should not make anyone dependent on coming back. It should make going home slightly different.
Why integrate architecture, food, nature, and wellness?
Because they stop being separate the moment a guest is here. They are separate on an organisation chart and nowhere else. The body responds from the moment you arrive, to shade, ground temperature, humidity, sound, light, how far the walk is and what a wall feels like when the day has been hot.
Look at where the hours actually go. A guest staying three days may eat nine or more times, which makes the kitchen more influential than any single appointment. The same guest sleeps three nights, and sleep is largely decided by the room. Whether it holds the day's heat and hands it back at night. Whether it is quiet. Whether the night outside has been left dark.
If wellness lives in one building and everything around it is scenery, the rest of the day is unmanaged, and usually it is working against that one hour. The landscape is not the setting for this. It is part of the treatment environment.
So land, water, architecture, food, wellness and silence are not six departments. They are one system, and each part of it is modest on its own.
What do you want KIKI to become after 5–10 years?
This place will not be finished on the day it opens. That is not a caveat. It is the plan.
Trees will mature. Water edges will settle. Materials will weather, and I want them to. We will learn which spaces guests return to without being told to, and there will be a bench somewhere that people keep going back to, which no drawing predicted. Some things we are excited about now will quietly disappear because nobody needed them twice. The kitchen will move closer to what the land can actually produce, and that takes seasons to find out.
My work by then is not to defend every early idea. It is to protect the reason and let the rest become more intelligent. If we manage that, the place should be quieter, greener and wiser than it was at the start.
The compliment I would want then is not that it photographed beautifully. It is that someone can remember how their body felt here.
