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Coorg · Chikkana Halli Estate, Siddapura

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A working coffee and spice estate of 300 acres on the Cauvery, with 59 villas hidden in it.

A Lily Pool Villa courtyard at twilight from the deck: a lap pool lit turquoise on the left, a lily pond with a lantern standing in it on the right, and a thatched gazebo with a made-up daybed under it at the far end, with paddy dropping away behind.

The road from Mysuru runs out of plains at Kushalnagar and starts to climb, and somewhere past Siddapura the light changes — silver oaks close over the tar, pepper vines go up their trunks, and the temperature drops 4 or 5 degrees on its own. The turn onto the estate is unmarked enough that you will slow down to look for it. Then a track through coffee, a bridge over the stream, and the resort arrives as a scatter of red-tiled roofs among the trees rather than as a building. There is no lobby to speak of and no grand entrance to be walked up; the estate simply closes behind you and the noise of the road is gone in under a minute. Somebody hands you a coffee grown 400 metres from where you are standing, and an electric buggy takes you and your bags off down a path into the plantation.

The organic paddy terraces in the middle of the estate, cut into narrow bunded fields, with a row of tiled villas and their pools along the far edge and the forest closing over the stream at the top.

Every villa here has water on 3 sides of the sitting-out and plantation on the fourth. The Lily Pool villas put a lap pool and a lily pond side by side along the deck, with stepping stones across the pond and a thatched gazebo at the far end. The Heritage villas put the pool inside a walled laterite courtyard. Either way, the hour before dinner is the reason to be in the room: the light goes off the water, the frogs start, the bulbuls come down for the last of it, and the mist begins to lie in the coffee about the time you would have thought about a jumper. Behind you the room is terracotta underfoot and a pitched ceiling of stained rosewood, with a lantern on the desk. The bed is a four-poster in the Heritage Pool Villa and the Lily Pool Villa, and a plain double in the other 3 villas. There is no television out on the sitting-out, and you will not miss it.

The staff here are mostly from the villages the estate has drawn on for 3 generations, and they are not deferential in the hotel way. They have the confidence of people showing you around their own place. The naturalists are the proof of it: the plantation walk at 4 and the bird walk at 7 are led by men who can tell you which shade tree the pepper prefers and why the robusta is on the lower slope, and they are unhurried in a way a scripted tour never is. You get a hospitality executive rather than a butler, a buggy comes to the villa when you call for one, and the coffee in your room is the estate's own. Nothing here is performed. It is a farm that has learned to have guests, which is a rarer thing than a hotel that has learned to look rural.

The house

The estate straight down from the air in early morning: two lines of tiled villas with their private pools threaded through the canopy, the paddy terraces and the lake between them, and cloud lying in the trees on both sides.

A Heritage Pool Villa at last light — laterite block walls and a tiled Kodava roof with carved gables, the veranda lit from inside, and a rectangular pool with a round jet pool cut into the terrace beside it.

A four-poster bed under lace drapes in a room with a pitched timber ceiling and a terracotta floor, the doors folded back onto a deck with two chairs and the plantation immediately behind it.

The family pool at last light, lit from beneath in blue and gold mosaic with a planted island in the middle of it, loungers on the grass and the estate lake going flat behind the trees.

Drink and Dine

3 restaurants

The room the estate eats in, and where the Kodava cooking is
Granary
When
Breakfast 7.30 to 10.30am; lunch 12.30 to 2.45pm; high tea 4.30 to 6.30pm; dinner 7.30 to 10.30pm
Tables
Walk in
A tall open pavilion at the centre of the estate, and the room your breakfast and dinner happen in unless you have asked otherwise. The rate includes both, for the plain reason that there is no other kitchen within 20 minutes. The spread is wider than it needs to be — a genuine continental range, the standard Indian repertoire done properly — but the reason to sit down here is the Kodava section: pandi curry blackened with kachampuli, akki roti, kadambuttu, the cooking of a community that keeps pork and rice wine at the centre of its table and has never seen a reason to explain itself. High tea runs late afternoon and is worth breaking the plantation walk for.
Full entry →
Vegetarian, with the coffee on both sides of it
Plantain Leaf
When
Breakfast 7.30 to 10.30am; lunch 12.30 to 2.45pm; dinner 7.30 to 10.30pm
Tables
Worth booking
The vegetarian room, set out in the plantation with the bushes coming up to the windows, and it is not the lesser option — the North and South Indian cooking here is the deepest part of the kitchen, and a Kodava vegetarian table is a cuisine of its own rather than a concession. Your included meals can be taken here instead of at Granary. The same hours as the main room, without the high tea.
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The spice route, on advance booking only
Peppercorn
When
Lunch and dinner, by advance reservation
Tables
By reservation
The one room here you have to arrange in advance. It follows the pepper and cardamom that grow on this estate along the road they took to Europe, and cooks what happened to the food at each end of it. In practice that means kebabs and grills, done seriously, in a quiet room looking onto the estate lake. Ask the day before rather than the day of — the kitchen builds around who is coming.
Full entry →

What is here

At 4 O'Clock, Under the Silver Oaks
Starts at 4 in the afternoon, 2 hours, included in the rate, and it is the best thing on the property. A naturalist walks you through the 300 acres and explains what you have been looking at: why the coffee sits under silver oak rather than in sun, how the pepper gets up the trunk, what cardamom looks like before anybody has done anything to it, and how a cherry becomes the cup you were handed at arrival. In late February or March the whole estate is in blossom for about a week — white, and the smell carries a kilometre.
The Infinity Pool at the Forest Edge
At the boundary of the estate, where the coffee stops and the Dubare reserve begins, and adults only — which here means genuinely quiet rather than merely child-free. It is tiled in a dozen shifting blues with a boulder set into the shallow end and a single lounger on the grass above it, and there is nothing on the far side but canopy. Come at 6, when the light goes and the langurs start up in the trees. Dinner for two can be laid on the deck of it after dark.
Birds, and 300 of Them
Starts at 7 in the morning, 2 hours, included in the rate, with a naturalist and a spare pair of binoculars. The estate is unusually good for it because it is farmed the old way — shade coffee under native canopy is closer to forest than to a field, and the birds have never left. Malabar trogon, racket-tailed drongo, hornbills over the stream, and a great deal of noise from things you will not see. Coorg holds over 300 species, a quarter of everything on the Indian list. It works for people who have never done it before, which is the real test of a guided bird walk.
A Table in a Tree, and 4 Others
The estate lays 5 dinners where there is no restaurant, and each is done properly rather than as a novelty: a personal chef at a live counter, a butler, a menu of 5 courses written for you, and the drinks included. The Machan is a platform up a tree in the middle of the plantation. Lanterns by the Forest is a table at the edge of the Dubare reserve under hurricane lamps, which is what the first planters actually did. Moonlight for Two is the infinity-pool deck. Kodava Twilight is beside your own pool, if you are in a Heritage villa. By the Lake is the shared one, on a deck that takes 4 couples at a time.
Two Estates, Two Jeeps
The Plantation 4×4 runs an hour and 45 minutes through Chikkana Halli's own coffee, in a jeep built for it, and it goes where the walk cannot. Elkhill is the bigger one: an all-terrain run through 2,500 acres of the Ramapuram family's estates, planted in 1870, ending on a rock outcrop with this part of Kodagu going pale in front of you and something cold on the bonnet. Both are charged by the vehicle rather than by the head, up to 5 people. If you only do one, do Elkhill, for the ridge at the end of it.

Good to know

Pool heating is switched off through the hot months, from March to May.
The infinity pool at the forest edge takes adults only; children swim at the family pool by the estate lake.

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The rooms

Every villa has its own pool

All 5 villas have a private pool, temperature-controlled, 4 steps from the bed. So the question every other house makes you answer — how far up the list is the water — does not arise. What is left is the architecture, the floor plan, and the size of your party. Start with the party and work back.

Kodava or plantation: the only real stylistic choice

Heritage Pool Villa is Kodava architecture: hand-cut red laterite blocks, a deep tiled roof, carved pillars, dark wood, an interior courtyard, and a pool inside a walled compound.

The 4 Lily Pool villas are plantation-bungalow: whitewashed mud walls, high ceilings, thatch and tile, and a pool that runs alongside a lily pond with a gazebo at the end of it. They come from 2 traditions, and neither is a better version of the other.

Heritage Pool Villa is the more enclosed and the more theatrical.

The Lily Pool style is more open, and more Coorg.

Only 3 of the 5 cost exactly the same

Heritage Pool Villa, Lily Pool Villa and Lily Pool Duplex cost the same as each other, at 4,400, 2,600 and 2,044 square feet. They differ in character, not in rank, and the order they stand in on this page is not a price order.

The ground floor of a Lily Pool Duplex: planters' chairs and a settee on a terracotta floor under a folded timber ceiling, a writing desk along one wall and the doors open onto the pool deck.

A rock outcrop at the top of the Elkhill estate at dusk, a jeep parked at the edge of it and three people at a table, with ridge after ridge of Kodagu forest going pale into the haze beyond.

There is no lobby to speak of and no grand entrance to be walked up; the estate simply closes behind you and the noise of the road is gone in under a minute.

The particulars

Arrive: From 1 PM
Depart: By 11 AM

Where it is

Chikkana Halli Estate
Karadigodu Post, Siddapura
Kodagu, Karnataka 571253
India

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The small print

What our rate includes: The room, and every tax charged on it, are inside the price we quote. What you settle at the desk is what you use while you are here.
Breakfast and dinner are in the rate: Every rate here includes breakfast and dinner, taken at Granary or Plantain Leaf, along with the experiences that come free — the plantation walk, the bird walk, Coffeeology, the cultural show and the storytelling evenings. It is not an upsell: there is nowhere else to eat within 20 minutes of the gate. The jeep tours, the coracle, the Dubare and Bylakuppe trips and the intimate dinners are charged separately, at prices stated up front.
The pools are heated, except one: Every villa's pool is heated to between 26 and 28 degrees, which matters here: Kodagu sits at 900 metres and a December morning is genuinely cold. The Lily Pool Cottage is the one villa with no heating promised at all.

Room	Size	Sleeps	View	Bed	Layout
Heritage Pool Villa	409 m²	4	A walled laterite courtyard	1 four-poster bed	1 bedroom, 1 bath
Lily Pool Villa	242 m²	4	The paddy and the coffee	1 four-poster bed	1 bedroom, 1 bath
Lily Pool Duplex	190 m²	4	The canopy from the balcony	1 double bed	1 bedroom, 2 baths
Lily Pool Cottage	149 m²	3	The plantation below	1 double bed	1 bedroom, 1 bath
Lily Pool Bungalow	195 m²	6	The lily pond and reeds	2 double beds	2 bedrooms, 2 baths

Evolve Back, Coorg

The house

Drink and Dine

Granary

Plantain Leaf

Peppercorn

What is here

At 4 O'Clock, Under the Silver Oaks

The Infinity Pool at the Forest Edge

Birds, and 300 of Them

A Table in a Tree, and 4 Others

Two Estates, Two Jeeps

Good to know

The rooms

The particulars

Where it is

The small print

Side by side

The rooms themselves

Heritage Pool Villa

Lily Pool Villa

Lily Pool Duplex

Lily Pool Cottage

Lily Pool Bungalow

Evolve Back, Coorg