The corporate retreat in Himachal was my idea and for the first three weeks nobody thought it was a good one.
Not Priya from operations who had done four offsites in city hotels and considered the formula settled. Not Vikram from product who said the team needed wifi more than mountains. Not even Ananya, my co-founder, who is usually the first person to say yes to anything that gets us out of the office.
I had one argument and I kept making it.
Every offsite we had done in the past four years had produced the same outcome. Two days in a conference room with better coffee than usual, a slide deck everyone had seen before the session ended, and a team that came back to Delhi feeling vaguely refreshed but fundamentally unchanged.
I wanted something different this time.
I did not know yet that different was going to be an understatement.
Why a Corporate Retreat in Himachal and Why The Sirmour Retreat
I had come across The Sirmour Retreat through a completely unrelated search.
I was looking for somewhere to take my parents for a long weekend and had ended up on a travel article about underrated properties in the Shivalik hills. The Sirmour Retreat appeared with photographs that stopped me mid-scroll. A property above the town of Nahan in Sirmour district, Himachal Pradesh. The entire Shivalik range visible from the terrace. A space that felt genuinely private in a way that most hill properties do not.
I noted it for the parents trip.
Then three weeks later, sitting in our Delhi office after a team meeting that had produced exactly nothing useful, I opened that note again.
And I had a different thought entirely.
What if we booked the whole thing.
Just us. The entire property. No other guests. No strangers at breakfast. No sharing the terrace with a family from Chandigarh who had nothing to do with what we were trying to figure out as a team.
I called The Sirmour Retreat that evening.
The conversation that followed was the first sign that this was going to be different from every corporate retreat in Himachal we had considered before.
What Booking a Private Property Actually Means
Most corporate offsites happen in hotels that are also hosting twelve other things simultaneously. Your strategy session competes with a wedding on the lawn. Your team dinner happens next to a table of strangers celebrating something loudly. The space is technically yours but it is also everyone else’s.
A corporate retreat in Himachal at The Sirmour Retreat as a private property means none of that.
When we arrived, the property was ours. Entirely. Every terrace, every common space, every corner with a view of the Shivaliks was available to our team and only our team for the entire duration of the retreat.
That sounds like a small thing until you experience what it actually produces.
People stopped performing.
That is the only way I know how to say it. In a shared hotel environment, even the most senior people in a room maintain a layer of professional presentation. Someone is always watching. Someone is always in earshot. The performative layer never fully comes down.
At The Sirmour Retreat, with the property entirely to ourselves and the Shivalik hills on every side and no audience beyond the mountains, that layer came down somewhere around the end of the first evening and did not go back up.
What emerged from underneath it was the team I had been trying to find for two years inside conference rooms.
The Drive Up and What It Did Before We Even Arrived
We travelled in two cars from Delhi. Eight people. A mix of founders, senior team, and two people who had joined us in the last six months and had never experienced an offsite with us before.
A corporate retreat in Himachal from Delhi means roughly 290 kilometres by road. Five to six hours. We left early on a Thursday morning, the city still in that specific pre-dawn state where it has not yet decided to be difficult.
By the time we passed Ambala and the road started climbing, something had shifted in both cars without anyone arranging for it to happen.
I know this because Vikram, who had been the most skeptical voice in the room three weeks earlier, sent me a message from the other car somewhere in the foothills.
It said: “Okay. I see it.”
That was all. I knew exactly what he meant.
Arriving at The Sirmour Retreat
We pulled into the property just after noon.
The Sirmour Retreat sits above Nahan town and the approach to it is its own quiet introduction to what is waiting. The road curves, the Shivaliks open up in every direction, and the building presents itself against that landscape without competing with it.
We stepped out of the cars and just stood there.
Eight people who spend most of their working hours in a glass office in Gurugram, standing in the Shivalik hills with the valley below completely still and the air doing something to all of us that I still cannot describe precisely but that everyone in the team has mentioned since.
Priya, who had been the most committed defender of the city hotel formula, looked around and said nothing for a long time.
Then she said: “Why have we not done this before.”
Not a question. A statement of something she had already worked out.
What a Corporate Retreat in Himachal as a Private Property Produces
The first session was supposed to happen at three in the afternoon in the main meeting space.
It happened on the terrace instead.
Nobody made a formal decision to move it. Someone sat down outside with their notebook and everyone else followed. The Shivaliks stretched out in every direction. The valley below was completely quiet. The agenda was the same agenda we had brought from Delhi.
But the conversation was different.
Ideas that had been stuck in the same place for months started moving. Not because the altitude had magically fixed our thinking but because the setting had removed the context that was keeping the thinking stuck. We were not in the office. We were not surrounded by the visual cues of the problems we were trying to solve. We were somewhere entirely different, in a space that was entirely ours, with nothing competing for our attention except the work in front of us and the hills behind it.
Vikram said something in that session that he had been circling around for six months without landing on.
It landed on the terrace in Nahan in about forty seconds.
A corporate retreat in Himachal at a private property does not give you new ideas. It gives you access to the ideas that were already there, waiting for a space that was not the usual space.
“A corporate retreat in Himachal at The Sirmour Retreat with the entire property to ourselves was the first offsite in four years where I felt the team actually showed up fully. Not professionally. Fully. The hills did something to everyone that no team building exercise has ever managed. We came back different. The work changed after that.”
Ananya, co-founder, guest at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
The Evening That Changed Something
The first evening session was not on the agenda.
We had planned dinner and then an early night. Everyone was tired from the drive and we had a full day of structured sessions planned for the next morning.
What actually happened was dinner that stretched almost three hours and then a conversation on the terrace that went well past midnight.
Not about work. Not entirely. About why we had started the company. About what we had wanted it to be before the daily pressure of running it had compressed that vision into something smaller and more defensive. About the version of the team we had imagined when we were still small enough to imagine things freely.
Priya talked about something she had been carrying for eight months without saying out loud. Vikram said something about his role that reframed an entire quarter of friction in thirty seconds. One of the newer team members, Rahul, asked a question that nobody had thought to ask before and the answer turned out to be something we needed urgently.
None of that would have happened in a hotel in Gurugram. The walls were wrong. The context was wrong. The presence of strangers in adjacent rooms was wrong.
The Sirmour Retreat at night, with the Shivaliks dark around us and the property entirely our own and nobody else anywhere nearby, created a container for that conversation that I could not have designed deliberately.
It just happened.
What the Mornings Did to the Team
I want to tell you about the mornings because they surprised me most.
Our team is a city team. We function after ten. We need coffee to reach full capacity. Early mornings are something that happen to other people.
On the second morning I came to the terrace at six thirty, fully expecting to be alone.
Five of the eight were already there.
Nobody had set an alarm. Nobody had arranged to meet. They had simply woken up and walked toward the view because the view was there and the city habit of staying horizontal until the last possible moment had apparently not made the journey from Delhi.
Ananya was sitting at the far end of the terrace with a notebook, writing something that was not a work document. Vikram was standing at the edge looking at the valley with his coffee going cold in his hand. The two newer team members were sitting together talking in the quiet way people talk when they are not yet fully awake but the surroundings are interesting enough to pull them out anyway.
A corporate retreat in Himachal does this. The mornings here are not like mornings anywhere else. The light arrives differently. The air is different. The absence of city noise creates a silence that is not empty but full of something that makes getting up early feel like a reasonable and even appealing idea.
We did our best work before nine on both full days.
That has never happened in four years of working together.
The Food That Became Its Own Agenda Item
I had not planned for the food to matter.
It mattered.
The Sirmour Retreat serves Himachali cuisine with a confidence and lightness that turns every meal into an event worth pausing for. Not elaborate. Not trying to perform. Simply very good food made with genuine attention to what is actually in it.
Lunch on the second day happened late because the morning session had overrun in the best possible way. Nobody was impatient. Nobody checked the time.
When the food arrived the conversation stopped completely for about three minutes.
That has also never happened in four years of working together.
Dinner on the second evening was the meal that Priya has mentioned three times since we came back. A Himachali preparation of dal that she said bore no resemblance to any dal she had eaten in Delhi despite using the same ingredients.
The altitude, the water, the fact that nobody is rushing it.
Those three things together produce something that a city kitchen cannot replicate regardless of effort.
What Came Out of This Corporate Retreat in Himachal
By the end of day two we had made three decisions that had been stuck for months.
Not because we had held a better structured session. Because the people in the session were different versions of themselves than the versions that showed up to meetings in Gurugram.
Calmer. More direct. Less defensive about territory. More willing to say the actual thing rather than the diplomatically acceptable version of it.
The Sirmour Retreat did that. The private property did that. The hills, the quiet, the mornings, the meals, the terrace at midnight with the valley completely dark below us.
All of it working together to produce the conditions that four years of city offsites had never quite managed.
Ananya said something on the drive home that I have thought about several times since.
“We should have done this instead of every other offsite we have ever done.”
I did not say I told you so. I am saying it now, quietly, to the version of myself that almost did not push for it.
What You Should Know if You Are Considering This
The Sirmour Retreat is available as a private property for corporate teams. The entire property, entirely yours, for the duration of your retreat. No shared spaces with other guests. No compromise on privacy. No performance for an audience that has nothing to do with your work.
Nahan is 290 kilometres from Delhi and about 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. Five to six hours by road. Leave early and the drive itself becomes the first session of the retreat, in the best possible sense.
A corporate retreat in Himachal works best for teams between eight and twenty five people. Intimate enough for real conversation. Large enough for meaningful cross functional work. The Sirmour Retreat accommodates that range with spaces that suit both structured sessions and the kind of unstructured evening conversations that actually move things.
The best months are March through June and September through November. October is particularly good for outdoor sessions. The post monsoon clarity makes the Shivaliks extraordinary and the temperature is perfect for working outside across a full day.
One practical note. Tell the team to leave their laptops closed for the first evening. The instinct to keep working through dinner will be there. Resist it. The conversation that happens instead is the one that makes the next two days work.
The Only Thing We Got Wrong
We booked two nights and three days.
We should have booked four nights and five days.
By the end of day two the team had found a rhythm that I did not want to interrupt. Conversations were still happening. Ideas were still moving. The space was still doing its work.
We packed up because we had booked two nights and not because anyone was ready to leave.
On the drive back Vikram said: “Can we just turn around?”
We could not. We had meetings on Friday.
The next corporate retreat in Himachal is already in the calendar.
Five nights this time.
The property will be ours again. The hills will be the same hills. The terrace will be waiting.
So will the work we have not yet found the right space to finish.
