Our Story
A house built around its garden
Four generations, one lawn, and a family that finally decided to share it.
In 1958, a young timber merchant named Devraj Vellari bought eleven acres of riverside land on the edge of Kanpur, mostly because of a single banyan tree already older than anyone could date. He planted mango and champa around it, built a modest house at the far end of the plot, and spent the next three decades turning the rest into lawn — not for any occasion in particular, just because grass along a river seemed like the right way to live.
The garden outlived him. His children hosted their weddings on it. So did their children. By the time his granddaughter, Nandini, inherited the property in 2019, half of Kanpur had, at some point, stood on that lawn in wedding clothes — and the house itself had quietly become too large for one family and too well-loved to sell.
What we've built is forty-two rooms and a restaurant around what was already there. The old trees were mapped before a single foundation was dug, and the plan was redrawn twice to avoid moving them. The lawn was re-turfed but never resized. What's new is mostly invisible: better plumbing, a proper kitchen, forty-two rooms where there used to be four.
We didn't want to build a hotel that happened to have a garden. We wanted to finally let people into the garden, and build a hotel around that.
— Nandini Vellari, Third GenerationA Short History
How the garden became Vellari
Devraj Vellari buys eleven acres beside the Ganges, built around a banyan tree already centuries old.
The family house is completed at the far end of the plot. The first wedding is held on the lawn the same winter.
Nandini Vellari inherits the estate and begins drawing up plans to open it as a small hotel, without losing the garden.
Restoration begins. Every tree on the property is mapped first; construction plans are drawn around them.
Vellari opens its gates this winter, with forty-two rooms, a restaurant, and the same fifteen acres of lawn.
On the banks of the Ganges
Vellari sits just outside central Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, with direct river frontage and easy road access from the city. A full address and directions will follow closer to opening.