Treasure Nepal was founded in Los Angeles in 2017 by Kenneth Bodner, a former architectural conservator who had spent the better part of a decade working on heritage restoration projects across South and Central Asia. The company's first office was, technically, the corner of Kenneth's apartment in the Pico-Union neighbourhood. Today it occupies a small, plant-filled space on Timber Oak Drive — and a slightly less-plant-filled coordination office in Thamel, Kathmandu.
We are not a tour operator in the conventional sense. We do not sell packages off a shelf. Every journey we plan and every object we source begins with a conversation, and most of those conversations begin with a question we ask ourselves first: does this honour the place?
Three principles have guided everything we have done since the studio's founding, and they appear — in one form or another — in every contract we sign and every itinerary we publish.
The standard Annapurna circuit is sold as a 12-day trek. We almost always recommend 17. Not because we want to charge you more (the per-day cost is usually lower), but because the difference between rushing through a place and arriving in it is roughly five days of patience.
Every artisan we work with is paid above the local market rate, in advance, and is named publicly in our documentation. We have walked away from sourcing relationships where this was not possible, and we will continue to do so.
For every cultural or antique object we handle, we maintain a complete chain-of-custody record, perform due-diligence checks against the relevant cultural heritage registers (Nepal's Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1956 chief among them), and refuse acquisitions where ownership history is unclear. This is slower. It is also right.
Treasure Nepal is a team of seven people across two cities. We work in close partnership with a wider network of guides, artisans, scholars, and conservators — most of whom we have known for years.
Our registered office in the United States is at 4704 Timber Oak Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90017. Visits are by appointment — we are a small team and we genuinely enjoy meeting clients, but we cannot accommodate drop-ins. Our Nepal coordination office is in Thamel, Kathmandu, and is open to clients during the planning phase of any journey.
