About Neelambari
Built by people who were already here.
Neelambari opened in September 2017, in the village its founders come from. The question it started with was not what would sell, but what could usefully be done in Arattupuzha — which turns out to produce a rather different sort of place.
What we were trying to build
A counterweight to the other kind of tourism
Kerala is very good at mass tourism, and there was no reason to add to it. What was missing was somewhere that showed what this part of the state is actually like — Thrissur and the villages around it — without staging any of it, and without building a version of Kerala for visitors to look at.
Most of the industry thought this was a poor idea. The village did not.
It has taken a while and it is not finished. We still keep finding things in our own traditions we had not looked at properly, and ways we could be doing this better.
The people
Meera, Sreeni and the team
Everyone who works here is from the village. Most of them have known each other since childhood, which is obvious within about a day of arriving.
Sreeni grew up here, read mechanical engineering at IIT Kanpur, then spent seventeen years in corporate work. The more he travelled, the more obvious it became that the cultural inheritance sitting in his own village was worth more attention than anything he was flying to see. He started Neelambari in 2017.
Meera joined once the doors opened, and has had rather more to do with how the place turned out than the founding did. She runs the hospitality, the food and the team. If a guest remembers one person from their stay, it is usually Meera.
Saju, Viku, Savithri and Suresh are all from Arattupuzha, all known to the founders since childhood, and between them responsible for most of what a guest actually experiences. Guests write to us about them by name.
Our endeavour
What the village gets out of it
Every member of staff is recruited locally, and most are women, a good number from households where a wage was not previously coming in. Beyond the payroll, the money moves outward: the farmers, vendors, artists and artisans we buy from have been the same ones for years. When the floods came in 2018 the property was used for what it was needed for.
Environmental thinking shaped how the buildings were put up and how the place is run day to day. We would not claim it is where it should be.
If you want to talk about any of this properly — how the community side works, what has failed, what we would do differently — write to Sreeni directly.
Coming to see for yourself