Hill homes in Coorg, Karnataka

Kodagu, still widely called Coorg, is a district of hills, coffee and one very particular house. The ainmane is the ancestral home of an okka, a patrilineal clan, and it was built to hold all of them. A wide raised verandah called the kayyale runs across the front, square wooden pillars taper as they rise, and the plan closes around a mund, a square courtyard open to the sky with the roof sloping inward to it. Granary, ancestral shrine and outbuildings sit around the same yard. These are large buildings, often twenty metres across, in laterite and timber under Mangalore tile, and a heritage homestay in Coorg is very often one of them or an estate bungalow built later on the same logic.

Coffee here is grown under shade, Arabica and Robusta beneath silver oak and jackfruit with pepper vines running up the trunks, so an estate reads as forest with rows in it rather than as a plantation. Talakaveri, where the Kaveri rises, is at the top of the district, and Bhagamandala, Dubare and the Nagarhole boundary are all within an hour or two.