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Varun Nagpal wants you to feel nostalgia when you walk into one of his houses. Not comfort or awe, but nostalgia for a place you’ve never been. And honestly, he means it.
The 42-year-old founder of Vianaar Homes has spent eighteen years building villas across Goa, Kasauli, and now the Ahangama coast in Sri Lanka, and he believes that “a home should slow you down slightly,” he tells me. “It should help you pause.”
He started Vianaar at twenty-three, on a college vacation with a twelve-apartment project in Reis Magos called Sol Sienda. Sixteen years and roughly twelve hundred residences later, he runs the company with his sister Naina, who’s the actual architect — he’s the engineer, the dealmaker, the guy who picks the art. What started as a real estate company has quietly grown into something closer to a club. There are villas with cacao plantations and butterfly gardens. There’s a private catamaran called NAO that takes homeowners through the mangroves. There’s an artist residency, now in its second year.
There’s The Blue Kite, the rental arm, which has expanded from Goa into Kasauli, Shimla, Nainital, Delhi, and is heading into Pune and Bangalore next. There’s Vianaar Escapes, which is the same thing but more curated. A homeowners’ clubhouse is on the way. The company did ₹194 crore in revenue last year, and Nagpal is still bootstrapped.
His first love, though, is Goa. Ask him where in Goa he’d send you that nobody else would, though, and you can send him on a rant. He tells you to ride through the villages in the monsoon with no destination. “Stopping at tiny local bakeries for chai and fresh poi,” he says, “swimming in quarries, hearing almost nothing except birds and rain.” That’s the Goa he fell in love with at twenty-three. Eighteen years on, it’s still the one he’s trying to sell.
In a conversation with Esquire India, Nagpal talks about building at twenty-three, the difference between landscaping and ecology, and why luxury, for him, has nothing to do with how far something has travelled.
Excerpts from a conversation.
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