Our Story

It started on a street of shop windows

We grew up in Kupondole, Lalitpur (sister district to Kathmandu, Nepal) a small stretch of the city known for stores full of handcrafted, high-quality, quietly luxurious things. On the way to school, or on a visit to a relative nearby, we would slow down outside those windows. There was always something new to look at, a different weave, a different finish, a display that had changed since the last time we passed. We never knew what we would see next, and that was the whole thrill of it.

At home, our mother kept the same eye. She filled our house with handcrafted wooden decor, Nepali cotton bedsheets, tablecloths, cushions, a brass vase that never moved from its corner, copper glasses and water bottles, felt slippers in winter, malmal shawls she wore on ordinary days for no particular reason at all. Nothing was there to impress anyone. It was simply how she believed a home should feel.

She and our grandmother also rolled rope incense by hand, not as a business, just something they did quietly, without any fuss. I never picked up the skill myself. It has stayed with me anyway, because I now see so many women earning a proper income from that same craft, and from weaving, and from all the handwork that used to live inside houses like ours with no name attached to it. Watching that shift, from something done at home for no one in particular, to something that can build a woman her own independence, is part of what makes this work feel worth doing.

We did not realise it then, but between the shop windows and everything our mother and grandmother made with their own hands, that was where it began, but that was where it began. Long before there was a business, there were three girls who loved bringing something handmade home, whether it was a gift for someone else or a small find for ourselves.

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Three sisters, three very different roles

There are three of us. I am Ojaswi, the youngest, and I run House of Himalayas from Melbourne. My elder sister Ibha is in Nepal, working directly with our artisans and suppliers, building and holding the relationships that everything else depends on. Our eldest sister Abha lives in the United States. She is the quiet one in the group chat who keeps us honest, and the one who often sees what we cannot see because she is a step outside the daily noise of it.

Three countries, three time zones, and somehow it works, because none of us are doing the same job twice.

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The ache that started it

Before any of this, I spent two years working with an arts collective, then four years leading a circular economy social enterprise that upcycled discarded tyres, weaving in local craftsmanship and knowledge so that everything we used stayed locally sourced and easy to access. Across both, I was working directly alongside Nepali artists and artisans, close enough to see what their craft actually asks of them: the time, the discipline, the creativity, and the resilience it takes to keep a tradition alive when the world keeps moving faster around it. That closeness stayed with me even after I left it.

Ibha's ache started differently. She moved to Africa with her family for her husband's work, and found herself building a home away from not just her family, but everything that had ever made a house feel like home. That distance is where she first tasted it properly, the specific kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with people and everything to do with the objects and textures you grew up around. When she eventually returned to Nepal, she was ready to build something of her own.

That timing was not lost on me. I called her, and I called Abha too, and pitched the idea that would become House of Himalayas. It was risky. None of us pretended otherwise. But our love for handmade and artisanal work was strong enough that we knew this was a journey we needed to be part of, together.

That is how House of Himalayas began.

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Then, right on cue, life had other plans

We started with what we knew best, high quality cotton bedsheets, sterling silver jewellery, gold-plated brass jewellery, and playful felt pieces. It felt like everything was finally falling into place.

From the very beginning, sourcing was never only about the product. We were clear that we wanted to work with organisations that were women led, that trained and employed women artisans, and that were committed to fair pay and genuine inclusion. It mattered to us that this be more than a transaction. We wanted our work to grow a community of women building their own independence, not simply fill out a product range.

And then it was not, in the best possible way. I was pregnant, and it was a genuinely challenging stretch, so the business paused while our family life quietly took over.

Looking back, that pause gave us something we would not have found otherwise: the chance to slow down and ask what we actually wanted House of Himalayas to be. We decided to widen what we offered, so people could experience the same range of craftsmanship we grew up surrounded by in Nepal, not just one category, but the full breadth of it, all under one name.

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The question that would not leave me alone

Even with the products taking shape again, one question kept returning. Our children would grow up here, in Australia. How would they learn about their culture, and interact with it, in a way that actually stuck?

That question led us to Alchi, a Nepali board and card game studio creating games designed to teach younger generations about their culture while they play, and to give anyone, from any background, an easy and enjoyable way into it. Bringing their games into House of Himalayas was not a detour from what we were building. It answered a question we had been carrying since the beginning.

What we love just as much is how Alchi runs itself. A portion of their profit goes toward donating games to schools in rural Nepal, so that a child's chance to play and learn through their own culture never comes down to what their family can afford. That is the same value we were already building House of Himalayas around, which made bringing them in feel like an easy yes.

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What we hear, and what we believe instead

We hear it often. Focus on one thing, you have too many categories. We understand why people say it.

But here is what we believe. Bedsheets, jewellery, felt pieces, Lokta journals, board games, they are not separate ideas competing for attention. They are different expressions of the same thing, the creativity and craftsmanship of Nepal, and the belief that it deserves to be noticed, owned, and cherished, not filed under one narrow category.

House of Himalayas exists to connect Nepal and Australia through story, craft, and culture. Three sisters, three countries, one home we are still learning to carry with us.

Rooted in Nepal. Made for homes in Australia.