Inside a 200-year-old chapel near Mumbai, reimagined as an intimate arts venue

Inside a 200-year-old chapel near Mumbai, reimagined as an intimate arts venue

On certain mornings, the drive out of Mumbai begins in compression with glass towers, flyovers, and the low-grade impatience of traffic, before loosening into the long, engineered sweep of the Mumbai–Pune Expressway. It is a road of tunnels and viaducts, banking curves and sudden descents, cutting through the basalt folds of the Western Ghats.

As the ascent toward Khandala begins, the mood shifts. The Bhor Ghat section — historically a crucial rail and trade pass — remains one of the most dramatic stretches of the route. In the monsoon months, waterfalls streak down the rock faces; fog gathers without warning. The journey is efficient by design, but the landscape refuses to remain neutral. You move from velocity to vertigo to a certain suspended quiet.

One of the entrances to the chapel | Photo Credit: Special arrangement

It is within that quiet that Abbey 301 now stands.

The chapel, named after the area’s postal code, predates the Expressway by nearly two centuries. Held by the Kotak family since 1973, the nearly 200-year-old black basalt chapel has entered a new chapter under Kamini Kotak and architect Adil Dholakia of Five Cross Architects, who led its recent restoration.

The property was acquired by the late Bhagwanbhai Kotak, the family patriarch, who encountered the former Anglican chapel at a time when its congregation had thinned in the years after Independence and the building stood decommissioned and locked. With deep roots in the Sahyadris, the family already considered the region home. Drawn to the chapel’s gravitas, Bhagwanbhai persuaded the Church to sell it to him, initially imagining it as a library for his personal collection.