Dwarika’s Hotel
Dwarika’s Hotel is a heritage property in Battisputali, Kathmandu, built around courtyards of rescued Newari woodcarving. It holds the largest collection of Newari wood art in the world and has been given the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award for cultural heritage conservation, along with the PATA Heritage Gold Award.
A hotel that began as a rescue operation
In 1952 Dwarika Das Shrestha watched a carpenter cutting up a carved wooden pillar for firewood. Old Kathmandu was coming down at speed and the woodwork on those buildings, some of it centuries old, was going with it. He bought that pillar. Then he kept buying, for the next forty years, whenever a Newari house was demolished anywhere in the valley.
The hotel was built to house what he had saved. It took more than thirty years to construct, because each courtyard was designed around the pieces that had been rescued rather than the other way round. He also revived Dacchiapa, the Newari method of making carved brick, which had almost died out, and opened a restoration workshop in 1962 that still repairs damaged pieces today.
Staying there
There are just over eighty rooms and forty-eight suites, arranged around brick courtyards in the pattern of traditional Newari houses. Terracotta underfoot, carved lattice windows above, and the noise of the city dropping away as soon as you are through the gate. Rooms differ from one another because the salvaged material differed, so no two are quite alike.
Dwarika Das Shrestha died in 1992. His wife Ambica Shrestha took over and the family still runs it, three generations in, which is unusual for a hotel of this standing anywhere.
Why we use it
Most five-star hotels in Kathmandu could be five-star hotels anywhere. This one could only be here. Guests arriving for a Himalayan journey usually want their first and last nights to feel like Nepal rather than an international lobby, and Dwarika’s does that without asking anyone to give up comfort to get it.
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