At Vianaar, Varun Nagpal Wants You to Feel Nostalgic for A Place You've Never Lived

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.

You started Vianaar at 23 with a 12-apartment project called Sol Sienda. Sixteen years later, what would the 23-year-old you find unrecognisable about how you build today?

At twenty-three, I was building largely through instinct, intuition and intent. I was deeply fascinated by how architecture could shape the feeling of everyday life, but my understanding of what truly makes a home meaningful was still evolving. Over the years, that understanding has been refined through experience, through the landscapes we build within, and through observing how people actually live inside the spaces we create.  What would probably feel most unrecognisable to my younger self is the patience and depth with which we approach a project today. We spend an enormous amount of time understanding land before architecture even begins. The movement of natural elements like wind, the quality of light across different hours, existing vegetation, topography, microclimate — these elements now shape design as much as plans or elevations do.  Earlier, the ambition may have been to create beautiful homes. Today, the ambition is to create a deeply considered way of life.

At the same time, the original impulse remains unchanged. I’ve always believed that a home should slow you down slightly. It should help you pause - reconnect you with nature, with stillness, and with yourself. That belief existed at twenty-three. Time has simply given it greater clarity and discipline.

You've spoken about "homegrown luxury" as something distinct from the imported version. In a country where luxury real estate often means Italian marble and European fittings, what does Indian luxury actually look like inside a Vianaar home?

For me, luxury has never been defined by how far something has travelled. It is defined by how deeply it belongs.

India has always possessed an extraordinarily sophisticated understanding of sensory living — our relationship with courtyards, shaded transitions, verandahs, gardens, filtered light, natural ventilation is centuries old. Somewhere along the way, modern luxury became associated with imported materials and visual excess, but I believe people today are searching for something far more meaningful.

To me homegrown luxury is earthy — it is visible in the craft and heritage of the geography. We curate spaces in keeping with local artists and pay patronage to indigenous materials like terrazzo, Indian patent stones, lime plaster, natural stone. Cane, rattan and bamboo run an earthy narrative through the design philosophy.

Biophilic design has become a marketing buzzword in Indian real estate. At Villa Da Zita you're growing cacao; La Sierra has dragon fruit and butterfly gardens. Walk me through how you’re doing it differently?

I think the key difference is that, for us, nature is not something layered onto a project after the architecture is complete. Nature is often the starting point of the design process itself.

There is an important distinction between landscaping and ecology. Landscaping is frequently decorative. Nature, when approached meaningfully, changes behaviour, mood, biodiversity, temperature, and the experience of living.

At Vianaar, we try to create environments that feel alive rather than staged. Whether it is cacao plantations, fruit-bearing trees, butterfly gardens, edible landscapes, or native planting, these are not visual gestures. They are intended to become part of daily life and reconnect residents with seasonality, biodiversity, and sensory awareness.

For me, true biophilic design is not about introducing greenery into architecture. It is about the absence of separation between human life and the natural world.

You met the artist Ivan Gette at NOTAGALLERY in Berlin and ended up inviting him to Goa for Vianaar’s first artist residency. What does art do to a built space that architecture alone can’t?

Architecture shapes how we inhabit space, but art shapes how we experience it. A well-designed home can create proportion, calm, openness, and beauty. But art introduces memory, interpretation, individuality, and emotional depth. It makes the space feel lived in.

When I met Ivan Gette in Berlin, what stayed with me was not only his work, but the thought behind it. Bringing an artist into the Vianaar ecosystem felt like a very natural extension of the kind of environments we are trying to create — spaces that feel layered, personal, and culturally alive.

Goa has always attracted people searching for a more reflective, creative, and alternative rhythm of life. The residency simply became an extension of that spirit.

Who do you view as the ideal “modern Vianaar resident”?

I don’t think of our residents through demographics as much as through mindset and sensibility.

The modern Vianaar resident is usually someone who values depth, calm, authenticity, and emotional quality of life over display. They are often globally exposed and well-travelled, but increasingly drawn towards silence, simplicity, nature, and more intentional living.

They appreciate design, but they are less interested in performative luxury and more interested in homes that feel restorative, warm, effortless, and deeply connected to their surroundings.

You’re building in Kasauli and Sri Lanka, and The Blue Kite is moving into Bangalore, Pune, Nainital. As you scale, the “deeply connected to place” promise gets harder to keep — every place is different, but the brand needs to feel consistent. How do you hold those two things in tension?

At Vianaar, consistency comes from philosophy.

We are not interested in imposing a fixed aesthetic language across geographies. A home in Goa should feel fundamentally different from one in Kasauli or Sri Lanka because climate, terrain, vegetation, culture, and pace of life are entirely different.

What remains constant is our way of thinking – way of living.  We always begin with place. We prioritise openness, natural light, landscape integration, privacy, emotional warmth, and a strong relationship with nature. We think deeply about how environments influence human behaviour and wellbeing.

As we scale, discipline becomes even more important. We are very conscious about where we build and how quickly we grow because this kind of work requires sensitivity, patience, and attention to detail. Scale cannot come at the cost of nature, creativity or our slow living philosophy.

Talk to me about a single offbeat experience in Goa that you’d send a guest to instead of the obvious ones — somewhere most of your residents probably haven’t been, that captures the Goa you fell in love with at 23.

I would probably send them out very early during the monsoon into the quieter villages and backroads of Goa and without a fixed destination.

Some of my strongest memories from my early years here are from riding through dense greenery during the monsoon, passing old Portuguese homes, watching mist lift gradually off the fields, stopping at tiny local bakeries for chai and fresh poi, and swimming in quarries, hearing almost nothing except birds and rain.  That version of Goa still exists, but it reveals itself only when you move away from the obvious circuits and begin experiencing the state at a slower rhythm.

A homeowner walks into a Vianaar home for the first time. Forget the brochure language — what’s the smallest, almost invisible detail you most want them to notice that tells them everything about how you think?

Probably the way the home breathes - the sense of nostalgia the home evokes in them!

Most people may not consciously register it, but we spend an extraordinary amount of time thinking about orientation, shaded transitions, airflow, play of light, and the seamless relationship between indoors and outdoors.

There are also many quieter decisions that people may only experience subconsciously — the proportion of a window/door relative to the landscape outside, the way privacy is achieved without feeling enclosed, the softness of natural light across different hours of the day, the gradual transitions between architecture and garden.

To me, luxury often lives inside these almost invisible decisions. Individually they may appear subtle, but collectively they shape how a space makes you feel.

If someone walks into a Vianaar home and immediately feels calmer, lighter, and more at ease, then I think the biophilic design and architecture has done what it was intended to do.