A nature club at the foot of Tamhini Ghat.

We built this for the kind of weekend we’d stopped having.

There is a question many of us keep coming back to, usually in a cab to the airport, usually after a particularly brutal week. Why do weekends now exhaust us more than weekdays?

We traced it to a simple problem. The places we escape to are built around the same pace we are trying to escape. Brunches. Bars. Loud rooftops. More people. More decisions. More phone. Sunday evening arrives, and the body that was supposed to rest has only been louder, in a different setting.

Club Parijat is our answer. A working fruit grove at the foot of Tamhini Ghat, an hour and a half from Hinjawadi and three and a half hours from BKC. Designed not as a resort, but as a small, deliberately-restricted nature club for the kind of weekend we’d all stopped having.

Slow time, in season.

Members come for what they come for. Sometimes that is the kids. Sometimes that is a book. Sometimes that is sleep. We don’t programme around you. We do programme around the seasons.

Through the year

• Monsoon — guided trails, rain and waterfall walks, paddy and millet transplanting, forest bathing, audio-led mornings.
• Winter — plant-your-own vegetable patches, hydroponics, herb gardens, millet harvest, star-gazing, bird watching.
• Summer — mango plucking and seasonal kitchen, kokum collection, cashew-apple, wild berry-picking.

The kitchen is lacto-vegetarian. No alcohol. Farm-to-fork. These are features, not restrictions.

One hundred members. Year one.

We are opening a Founding 100 cohort this quarter. The membership runs ten years on purpose. Anything shorter lets people treat this as a weekend gym membership, and it isn’t. The grove will take ten years to mature into what we think it will become. We want the members and the place to grow into each other.