This 100-Year-Old Kathkuni House Is Rewriting The Rules Of Himalayan Tourism

Four kilometres up a bumpy dirt track from Naggar town in Himachal Pradesh, at 2,300 metres above sea level, sits Chachogi—a hamlet of roughly twenty houses, ringed by holy oak groves and shepherded flocks. It is the kind of place mass tourism hasn’t found yet, largely because the road hasn’t found it either. That absence of connectivity has, paradoxically, preserved something rare: a living, working example of Kathkuni, the centuries-old Western Himalayan building technique that modern concrete is quietly erasing elsewhere in the valley.

Vijyendra Thakur found this village while researching his Master’s thesis in Social Design, and never really left. What he built there—a 100-year-old Kathkuni farmhouse restored using 90 per cent recycled materials and reopened as ART Village Naggar—is now equal parts heritage-conservation project, design experiment, and a working answer to a question Himalayan tourism has struggled to ask, let alone answer: how does a place open its doors to the world without losing itself in the process?

From Systems Thinking To Stone And Timber

Thakur didn’t arrive at this work through architecture school or heritage activism. He grew up fascinated by systems—how they function, how they fail, and how they might be redesigned—and carried that instinct into a career shaped by user experience and service design. In 2019, he left a decade of city life and returned to his home state of Himachal Pradesh to test that instinct against something more complicated than a digital product: a real, ecologically and culturally entangled landscape.

The years that followed were not romantic. He built a livelihood from scratch through a pandemic and natural disasters, all while watching the Kullu Valley transform around him—slopes cut indiscriminately, floodplains filled with debris, and concrete replacing forms that had stood for generations. It was, in his own framing, “acceleration without alignment.” In Chachogi, he found a village where that acceleration hadn’t yet arrived, and where the paradox was stark: residents wanted the road, the access, the opportunity they deserved—but with it would likely come the same uncontextualised development erasing indigenous architectural wisdom everywhere else. ART Village Naggar began as an attempt to let the village evolve on its own terms instead.

What Kathkuni Actually Is And Why It’s Disappearing

Kathkuni, from the Sanskrit kāshth (wood) and kona (corner), is a cator-and-cribbage construction method roughly 1,000 years old. Builders lay two parallel deodar timber beams longitudinally with a stone-filled cavity between them, rising in alternating courses of stone and wood, interlocked at the corners through wooden joinery alone—no cement, no nails, no metal fasteners. A massive stone plinth acts as a seismic dampener beneath walls that reach 45–60 cm thick, giving the structure a thermal time-lag of more than eight hours.

The engineering case for Kathkuni is not folklore. Laboratory testing published in the “Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers — Structures and Buildings” (2024) confirmed that the technique’s dowel connections and double-dovetail joints significantly boost shearing capacity, letting the mortar-less frame flex with seismic waves instead of cracking. The proof arrived in 1905: the Kangra earthquake (magnitude 7.8) killed more than 20,000 people and destroyed roughly 100,000 buildings, yet Kathkuni structures, including Naggar Castle, built around 1460, survived largely intact. Colonial geologist Charles Middlemiss recorded that timber-bonded buildings escaped with little damage while masonry structures were ruined around them.

And yet the technique is vanishing. Forest regulations restrict access to the deodar timber Kathkuni depends on. Skilled artisans, known as thawis, are disappearing as fewer buildings are commissioned. And younger generations have learned to associate concrete with modernity and status. Kathkuni has no UNESCO recognition, despite scholars advocating for it, and preservation efforts—architect Rahul Bhushan’s NORTH Studio, IIT Roorkee’s Resilient Himalayan Homes project, CEPT University’s landmark monograph Prathaa—remain scattered rather than systemic.

Asked what he saw as the biggest obstacle to someone building a new Kathkuni house today— timber scarcity, artisan shortage, cost, or regulation—Thakur didn’t point to any of those first. “The availability of timber, costs, skilled workers and forest restrictions can be resolved with sufficient funding,” he told Outlook Traveller. “But even with sufficient funding, the greater challenges remain.” Those, in his view, are the decline of community labour and a lack of social patronage.

Where resource use once followed community and climate need, it now follows market demand, and a technique that stops evolving, he argues, becomes a relic: something for “museums, theme parks, and history books,” not everyday life. Worse, building in Kathkuni today can invite suspicion of illicit forest extraction and social scorn. “So in a way Kathkuni is systematically discouraged in a market-based system,” Thakur said, “unless we consciously integrate it into building norms, supply lines, new materials, lifestyle needs or trends, and the education system.”

Restoring The House Without Freezing It

Thakur’s restoration of the century-old Chachogi farmhouse was never conceived as museum curation. His stated aim was to present Kathkuni “as an evolved construction technique adapted for modern lifestyles, not as a relic of the past,” which meant introducing practical adaptations rather than simply preserving the structure as is.

Two changes stand out. To meet modern fire-safety standards, he introduced fire-retardant gypsum cladding across interior walls and ceilings. And to solve a structural weak point common to all Kathkuni houses—the cantilevered verandas found on their upper floors, traditionally supported only on wooden joists that sag over time with no measured load-bearing capacity—he engineered a fix using wire ropes anchored to the Kathkuni walls. “Now the verandas can certainly support 2-3 tonnes of load,” he said, “and the tightly packed wire rope bracing also functions as a railing.” It’s a solution that reads as almost incidental design: a structural necessity that doubles as a safety feature, without altering the building’s character.

The property today runs on a similar philosophy of contextual sustainability. Walls keep their original crude mud plaster, all furniture is handmade locally from recycled forest-waste wood in a wabi-sabi style, and the palette stays entirely earthen. Modern comforts the original house never had—attached bathrooms, hot tubs, king-size beds, fire stoves, panoramic windows—sit inside solar water heating, rocket-stove central heating, rockwool insulation, hydroponic growing systems, and an offline septic tank that feeds the onsite vegetable garden. The accommodation is tiered across two duplex suites (Winter Blue and Summer Gold, each with a healing stone hot tub and mezzanine bedroom), two attic rooms (Fall Maroon and Spring Teal), and the Shepherd Hostel, a vertically arranged backpacker dorm rooted in Kathkuni technique itself.

Pricing runs from roughly INR 4,000 a night for a private room to about INR 30,000 for the entire six-bedroom villa, booked exclusively for 6 to 16 guests, notably accessible for a design-led heritage stay.

None of the workers who built it had ever worked on a Kathkuni project before; the traditional knowledge, Thakur noted, is mostly lost among the newer generation. He directed construction by reverse-engineering the existing structure and studying academic research on the technique. Many of those same workers, he said, now carry real expertise in natural construction and are in demand for it elsewhere.

Tourism That Doesn’t Consume The Village

The hospitality side of the project operates under a concept Vijyendra Thakur calls Adaptive Rural Tourism (ART), a deliberate rejection of single-destination tourism in favour of spreading immersive experiences across many villages. “ART is never about the destination; it is about the people,” he said. He chose Chachogi not because it was extraordinary but because it is “just another culturally unique remote village”—one of hundreds across Himachal, each with something distinct to offer, each a candidate for its own version of this model.

Guests at ART Village take part in village cultural and architectural tours through Chachogi, farm-to-table cooking and wood-fired pizza sessions, traditional mitti-chulah cooking classes, snowline treks to meadows (December–May), stargazing with campfires, and forest walks on hidden trails. For longer stays, the project runs modular courses in natural building techniques—mud plaster, wood joinery, resin art—and off-grid energy and waste management, alongside formal internship and volunteering programmes that frame backpackers as what Thakur called “ambassadors and shepherds” for more conscious travel.

When he started in 2018, this was, in his words, “an alien concept.” That’s changing. “People in India are recognising slow travel, experiential travel, cultural immersion, and staycations as preferred ways of travelling,” he said, though he’s clear-eyed that it’s “still a niche market compared to the huge mass tourism market.” His near-term focus isn’t scale; it’s attracting “select like-minded travellers,” with the longer goal of seeding “hundreds of more ‘Chachogis’” that could eventually decentralise tourism across the Himalayas altogether.

Measuring What Actually Changed

Asked about tangible impact, Thakur starts with local women. In remote villages, men can travel for work; women’s opportunities are largely confined to what exists within the village itself. ART Village provides direct and indirect employment in hospitality, local shops, and the sale of knitted or woven goods and homemade or forest produce—interactions that happen naturally as guests engage with local households. That relationship has been leveraged further: women and other villagers have been mobilised several times for cleanliness drives, and volunteers regularly gather local perspectives on everything from knitting and farming practices to village sanitation, feeding directly back into how the project evolves.

The clearest shift, though, may be perceptual. Early on, younger locals uniformly favoured concrete over Kathkuni, and some wanted to replace their own family homes with it. “Now, even though the majority’s view remains the same, the idea to value Kathkuni has been planted,” Thakur said. Tourists who once had no idea what Kathkuni was are now willing to pay a premium to stay in it, and that monetary signal is doing real work. “As travellers become more educated and discerning about Kathkuni, newer generations will value Kathkuni more,” he noted. Locals now visit the property for design ideas, and several are building new homes fully or partially in Kathkuni. He counted four or five such projects currently underway in and around the village, against roughly 30 new concrete builds in the same area. When he first arrived, only a rare temple was still built this way. “The younger generations today no longer look down on Kathkuni; rather, they see it with pride,” he said, while being careful to note the limits of that shift: “this change is more superficial than in practice... it is more of a realisation of hidden value rather than a lifestyle adoption.”

A Deliberately Small Future

Thakur is unsentimental about what would need to be true for this model to spread across the Himalayas. Mass tourism, in his view, carries an imperial undertone. The imposition of a dominant culture’s pace and tastes onto vulnerable mountain communities, and that instinct, “ingrained and hard-wired in the general population,” won’t change overnight. Overwhelming remote villages with that kind of visitor pressure, he argued, would be the wrong approach entirely.

Every village, in his framing, needs to adapt the model to its own strengths rather than copy Chachogi’s approach wholesale, and the tourist, not just the village, is expected to change: to grow more conscious over time, sensitive enough to actually meet an immersive experience halfway. His closing conviction is the project’s real thesis: “No village should change and give up their traditional systems, knowledge, and ecological interactions in order to welcome tourism.

The Information

ART Village Naggar is located in Chachogi, Naggar Panchayat, Dist. Kullu, HP 175130.

More at artvillagenaggar.com

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