I recently had a conversation on Instagram Live with Varun, the founder of Amrit Bhavan — an 8-room boutique hotel in Haridwar, right by the Ganga — and I walked away from it knowing significantly more about a part of India I thought I already understood.
The story of Amrit Bhavan starts the way the best stories do: with memory. The property was Varun’s family’s second home for years. Think 50 people, scavenger hunts through the city, bonfires by the river, some people spilling over into a hotel across the water because there simply wasn’t enough room. In 2017 the family decided to convert it. By 2020, it was open as a hotel. Varun has been involved in every part of it – conceptualisation, design, execution, and now the day-to-day running of it.
What I found genuinely interesting was how he talks about Haridwar. Most people I know — myself included, honestly — tend to mention Rishikesh in the same breath, or skip Haridwar altogether in favour of the more Instagram-friendly hill town. But Varun made a compelling case that Haridwar is actually older, more mythologically layered, and in some ways more alive than its more famous neighbour. The Ganga Aarti at Har ki pauri — where legend has it that drops of Amrit from the Samudra Manthan fell — is apparently more crowded than the one in Rishikesh. I did not know this. I genuinely did not know that Haridwar even had a Ganga Aarti of that scale.
He also runs Ekat Living, a design and lifestyle brand that reflects a lot of the same sensibility you see at Amrit Bhavan — thoughtful, rooted in Indian culture, not trying to be anything it isn’t. And there’s a new property in the hills in the pipeline, which he described as cozier, more intimate, drawing on inspiration from places like Huka Lodge in New Zealand — a fishing lodge on Lake Taupo where, apparently, the Queen of England has stayed three times and which left a real impression on Varun when he visited with his grandfather.
The bit about his grandfather actually stuck with me. His grandfather reads Monocle, found the lodge in its pages, insisted they stay there, and Varun has been drawing on that experience as a reference point for hospitality ever since. There’s something lovely about that — the idea that a single night somewhere can become a creative north star for years.
We also talked about storytelling in hospitality, which is something I care about a lot from a content perspective. Varun mentioned Narendra Bhavan in Bikaner as a property he deeply admires — not because it’s a restored palace or heritage structure, but because the story was constructed around a real character, a real space (the old gaushala, repurposed as the Traveler’s Table), and it works. People go to Bikaner for Narendra Bhawan. That’s remarkable.
Amrit Bhavan is on my list now. Properly on it.
Connect with Varun, Amrit Bhawan & Ekat Living
