A Quiet Anniversary in the Courtyard Villa

Most people who book the Courtyard Villa for an anniversary ask the same question first: is there anything to do. It is a fair question and the honest answer is not much, which is the point. What follows is what two nights here actually looks like, written down so you can decide whether it is the kind of quiet you want.

Arriving

The drive out is about a hundred kilometres from Mumbai, two to two and a half hours through Kalyan and Murbad, and the last twenty minutes of it stop feeling like a commute. There is no reception desk at the other end. Somebody meets you at the gate, walks you across to the villa and hands over the keys, and that is the whole of the formality.

Check-in is from two in the afternoon. Come earlier if the villa is free the night before and we will usually say yes — ask when you book rather than on the day.

The courtyard is the whole idea

The villa is four bedrooms arranged around an open courtyard with a plunge pool in the middle of it. Nobody else walks through. That sounds like a small thing until you have spent a weekend somewhere with a shared pool and a family of six discovering that the acoustics are excellent.

For two people it is more room than you need, and couples book it anyway, because the courtyard is what you are paying for. You can swim at eleven at night. You can leave a book face-down on a chair and find it there in the morning. You can have a conversation at normal volume.

The bedrooms open straight onto it, so the door being open is the default state for two days. Take the one on the eastern side if you like waking with the light.

What there is to do, if you want to

The farm is twenty acres and most of it is working land — orchard rows, vegetable beds, a small dairy with Gir cows, and a lot of birds. A hundred-odd species come through, and the good hour for them is between six and eight in the morning, before the heat and before anyone else is up.

You can walk the orchard, join whatever is being harvested that morning, take the path down towards the Kalu river, or sit by the step pool and do none of it. There is a library lounge with a fire pit outside it for the evenings, and a fire is easy to arrange — tell us at lunchtime and it will be lit by dusk.

What we would not do, on a two-night anniversary, is plan a day trip. Malshej Ghat and the forts are an hour away and worth a stay of their own; squeezing one into a short weekend tends to turn the whole thing into logistics.

Dinner

The Farm Kitchen cooks Maharashtrian and North Indian food from whatever the farm has produced that week, which means the menu is a conversation rather than a card. Say in the morning what you feel like and it gets built around that.

The setup people ask for most often is dinner laid in the courtyard itself, lanterns on the floor, the pool lit, and the kitchen leaving you alone between courses. It costs nothing extra and it takes about twenty minutes to arrange, so there is no need to plan it weeks ahead — although if you want flowers, a cake or anything brought in from town, that does need a day or two of notice.

Breakfast happens whenever you surface. If the answer is eleven, the answer is eleven.

The practical part

• The villa has four bedrooms and sleeps twelve comfortably, so an anniversary for two is a generous use of it — some couples bring both sets of parents and still have a bedroom spare.
• Rates are per night for the whole villa, not per room, with or without breakfast. Current rates are on the villa page.
• The plunge pool is not heated. From December to February the water is bracing in the morning and pleasant by three in the afternoon.
• Phone signal is decent, the wifi is fine, and nobody will mind if you spend Sunday morning on a call. It is simply harder to want to.
• One child aged six or under stays free. Dogs are welcome — there are rules, and they are short.

If you are planning something larger

Anniversaries turn into parties often enough that we have written the longer version down separately. For a milestone with thirty or forty people, or a wedding, the courtyard is one of several places on the farm that work, and the capacities are set out on the celebrations page.

For two people and two nights, though, the villa on its own is the answer. Check the dates, or call and we will tell you honestly which weekends are quiet.