We almost did not have an intimate wedding in Nahan.
We almost had eight hundred guests, a banquet hall the size of a cricket ground, and a wedding that would have taken eleven months to plan and approximately three weeks to forget.
My name is Anjali. My husband is Karan. And the story of how we ended up saying our vows in the Shivalik hills instead of a Faridabad function hall is the story I get asked to tell more than any other.
So here it is. From the beginning.
The Wedding We Were Planning Before We Stopped
Karan and I got engaged in February. By March we had a spreadsheet with forty seven line items. By April we had a caterer, a photographer, a decorator, and a seating chart that was already causing arguments between two families who had otherwise been entirely pleasant to each other.
The venue was a large banquet property on the outskirts of the city. Impressive from the outside. Enormous inside. The kind of place where you could fit a small neighbourhood and still have room for a stage, a dance floor, and a buffet line long enough to lose someone in.
I stood inside it during our second site visit and felt absolutely nothing.
Not nerves. Not excitement. Not the particular feeling you are supposed to have when you are standing in the place where you will get married. Just a kind of quiet blankness that I did not know what to do with.
On the drive home I said nothing for a long time. Then I said something I had not planned to say.
“This does not feel like us.”
Karan turned off the radio.
“No,” he said. “It really does not.”
The Conversation That Sent Us in a Different Direction
Two weeks after that drive, we were at a friend’s housewarming when his colleague Priya mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she had attended an intimate wedding in Nahan the previous spring.
I did not know where Nahan was. Neither did Karan. But the way Priya described it made both of us pay a different kind of attention.
She said the whole thing felt like a secret. Not in a small or disappointing way. In the way that genuinely special things feel when they have not yet been discovered by everyone. She said the property was called The Sirmour Retreat and that she still thought about it regularly, months after the wedding she had attended there.
She said: “The hills did something to that ceremony that no decorator in the world could have planned.”
We looked it up in the car on the way home.
By the time we reached our apartment, the decision had quietly already been made. Neither of us had said it out loud yet, but we both already knew.
What We Found When We Started Looking
The Sirmour Retreat appeared immediately in our search. And it was immediately different from every banquet property we had spent four months evaluating.
No photographs of stage lights and draped ceilings. No wide angle shots designed to make a room look larger than it is. Instead, the Shivalik hills stretching wide in every direction, a terrace looking over a valley that seemed to exist entirely for the people standing on it, and spaces that felt genuinely intimate rather than scaled down from something larger.
An intimate wedding in Nahan, we started to understand, was not a compromise version of a larger wedding.
It was a completely different thing altogether.
We drove up on a Sunday to see it properly. No appointment. No presentation from a sales team. Just a drive north from Delhi that took five hours and arrived at something we had not been expecting.
The First Time We Saw The Sirmour Retreat
The property sits above Nahan town, and the approach to it is its own small experience before you have even arrived. The road curves, the Shivaliks open up on every side, and the building settles into the landscape rather than imposing itself on top of it.
We stepped out of the car and just stood there.
The valley below the terrace was completely still. No noise from a highway. No ambient sound of a city functioning nearby. Just the hills, the sky above them doing something extraordinary with the late afternoon light, and a quiet that felt genuinely earned rather than simply absent.
Karan looked at me. I looked at him.
We did not need to say anything.
Planning an Intimate Wedding in Nahan
The conversations with The Sirmour Retreat team were unlike any vendor interaction we had experienced across eleven months of wedding planning.
Nobody asked us about our per head budget in the first ten minutes. Nobody handed us a standard package with tiers. The first real question they asked us was what we wanted our guests to feel when they arrived.
Not what the stage should look like. Not how many items we wanted on the menu. What did we want people to feel?
We said: held. Like they had arrived somewhere that was genuinely glad to have them. Like the setting itself was participating in the occasion rather than simply hosting it.
They said: that is exactly what this place does.
They were not wrong.
We planned the entire wedding in six weeks. Two ceremonies, forty four guests, three days. The family members who had initially raised eyebrows about the scale came around quickly once we showed them photographs of where the ceremony would actually take place.
Karan’s mother, who had been the most committed advocate for a larger event, looked at the photographs and said: “This actually looks like a wedding.”
The Day Itself
I want to be careful here because words tend to make extraordinary things sound ordinary.
Our first ceremony was on the evening of day one, on the open terrace as the sun dropped behind the Shivaliks. The light did what the light does in those hills at that hour: it turned everything gold and amber and then a particular shade of pink that exists only for about eight minutes before the sky makes its next decision.
Nobody was looking at the decor.
Everyone was looking at the sky, at each other, at the hills, at Karan and at me. The way people look at things when they are actually present rather than managing their experience from behind a phone.
My mother cried before the ceremony even started. Not during the rituals. Before them. She told me later it was because everything felt so close. No distance between the moment and the emotion.
That is what an intimate wedding in Nahan gives you that scale cannot.
It removes the buffer.
“We thought we were compromising by choosing an intimate wedding in Nahan. We understood on the day itself that we had not compromised on anything. We had simply chosen the version of our wedding that was actually ours. The Sirmour Retreat made sure of that in ways we are still grateful for years later.”
Anjali, bride at The Sirmour Retreat, Nahan
What Our Guests Said After
Forty four people attended our wedding.
Every single one of them has mentioned it to us since. Not in the polite way people mention events they attended and found pleasant. In the way people talk about experiences that did something to them.
Karan’s college friend, a person not known for sentiment, sent us a message three days after the wedding saying he had spent the entire drive back from Nahan thinking about how long it had been since he had been genuinely present at something.
My aunt, who had attended approximately sixty weddings in her lifetime, told me at a family gathering two months later that ours was the only one she remembered in complete detail. Not just the ceremony. The meals. The conversations on the terrace. The particular quality of the air on the second morning.
“The place got inside people,” she said.
We knew exactly what she meant.
The Sirmour Retreat as a Wedding Venue
What makes The Sirmour Retreat work as a venue for an intimate wedding in Nahan is not any single feature you can list on a brochure.
It is the combination of things working together without showing the effort.
The setting gives you a backdrop that no decorator can manufacture. The hills, the valley, the sky, these are not amenities. They are the main event. Everything else works in service of them rather than competing with them.
The food was an occasion in itself. Himachali flavours prepared with a lightness and confidence that made every meal feel considered rather than catered. Our guests talked about the dinners as much as they talked about the ceremonies. In the best possible way.
The team’s attentiveness was the kind you only encounter in places where people genuinely care about the outcome rather than the process. Details were remembered without being logged. Preferences were accommodated without being requested. The whole experience had a quality of care that felt personal rather than professional.
What You Should Know if You Are Considering This
An intimate wedding in Nahan at The Sirmour Retreat suits couples whose guest list sits somewhere between thirty and eighty people. Not a limitation. A design. A guest list that size means everyone knows where they are, everyone knows each other by the end of day one, and the ceremony itself has the weight of genuine witness rather than polite attendance.
Nahan is roughly 290 kilometres from Delhi and about 100 kilometres from Chandigarh. The roads are comfortable, the altitude is gentle, and the drive itself is worth making before sunrise if your guests are coming from the plains. Most of our guests said the journey up was already putting them in the right mood before they had even arrived at the property.
The best months for an outdoor ceremony are March through June and September through November. Our April wedding had weather that required no intervention from anyone. The light managed everything on its own.
The Thing Nobody Warns You About
There is a moment that happens at an intimate wedding in Nahan that nobody told us to expect.
It is the moment on the second morning when you wake up and the whole thing is already over, and instead of feeling the particular flat emptiness that follows large events, you feel something different. Full rather than empty. Complete rather than finished.
Karan described it as feeling like the wedding had actually happened to us rather than in front of us.
I have been trying to find a better way to say that and I cannot.
The Sirmour Retreat gave us back our own wedding. That sounds like a simple thing. It was not a simple thing at all.
One Year Later
We went back on our first anniversary.
Not for any event. Just to sit on the terrace, drink chai, and watch the hills do what they do in the early morning when the light is still deciding where to go.
Karan said something on that terrace that I have thought about many times since.
“Most places host moments. This place holds them.”
If you are somewhere between the spreadsheet and the seating chart, quietly wondering if there is a different way to do this, there is.
It is in the Shivalik hills. Two hours from Chandigarh. Five from Delhi. And it starts with three words that will change the entire conversation.
Intimate wedding in Nahan.
Just go.
