Palanpur · North Gujarat
A Heritage in Palanpur
Founded by Sanjay Raval · Palanpur · 22 Years
પાલનપુરનો વારસો — A Palanpur Heritage
Five businesses, one builder, twenty-two years. The hotel, the mall, the gym, the bookstore, the residency — each one started from the ground up, run for a generation, and eventually handed over.
The Idea
Long before he was the voice you've heard, Sanjay Raval was a builder of small, stubborn institutions in Palanpur — the kind of places a town's life is actually made of. A hotel that hosted weddings. A mall that gave the city its first modern shopping floor. A gym that kept three generations strong. A bookshop that arrived a decade before bookshops were fashionable.
None of them were "businesses" in the modern, deck-pitching sense. They were just places that needed to exist, that he made exist, and that he ran with care for over two decades — until the right time came to hand them on, and move his attention to a larger mission.
Five Institutions, One Town
A full-service hotel built from scratch in Palanpur — host to the town's weddings, conferences, family gatherings and the long afternoons that small-city life is made of. For two decades it was the address you gave when guests came from out of town.
Palanpur's first proper shopping mall, opened years before the category arrived in most cities its size. A bet on what the town would want before the town fully knew it wanted it — and a bet that paid off in two decades of steady custom.
A serious gym — equipment, mirrors, light, discipline — in a town where most fitness happened on morning walks or not at all. It kept its members loyal for years, and quietly raised the city's bar for what a public health space could look like.
Opened in 2004, when "bookstore" still meant a religious-pamphlet counter in most Indian small towns. Treasure Books carried fiction, biography, school texts, regional literature — a serious shop in a town that hadn't quite asked for one. The first of its kind in Palanpur, and a precursor by a decade to the Takshashila bookstores that came later in Ahmedabad.
A residential project in the same family — adding homes to the roster of hospitality, retail, fitness and books. Built and operated alongside the rest of the Treasure properties, and eventually transitioned out with them.
From the Archives
A handful of pictures from the long run — the buildings, the rooms, the small details that a town's daily life passes through without remembering the names of.
The Treasure properties have all been sold and continue to operate under their new owners. Their lessons — operate honestly, stay close to the floor, hand it on cleanly — carried forward into every initiative that came after.