The Patan Atelier · Kathmandu Valley
One roof in Lalitpur.
Cut, certified, and shipped — here.
A 46-year gemstone house where rough Himalaya enters as stone and leaves, six to ten weeks later, as a signed, GIA-numbered aquamarine with a paper trail.
Chapter One · The Founder
A bench in Patan, a brass loupe, and a single apprentice.
Hari Bhattarai opened a one-room lapidary on Patan Dhoka Marg in the spring of 1978, the year Kathmandu's first paved ring road was finished. He had learned to cleave tourmaline from his uncle in the old bazaar and had saved for nine years to buy a secondhand faceting machine shipped overland from Idar-Oberstein. For the first decade the workshop cut what the local trade brought him: smoky quartz, pale citrine, the occasional blue topaz that passed for aquamarine on a Jaipur buyer's table.
What changed the house was a single, unusually clean aquamarine crystal pulled from a riverbed in the Ganesh Himal range in 1991. Hari cut it in a slow emerald step, kept it for two years, and sold it, through a chain of four brokers, to a Belgian dealer for fourteen times his usual margin. He understood, then, that the stone was not the product — the path was.
Forty-six years later, the workshop on Patan Dhoka Marg is still in the family. Hari's son, Anish, runs the floor. His daughter, Purna, manages certification. The bench where he taught himself to read a crystal's grain is now bolted to the wall behind a glass case, used as a teaching prop for the three GIA Graduate Gemologists on staff. The house has never raised outside capital and has never sold through a third-party retailer.
The Bench
Three GIA gemologists. One master cutter. One roof.
The only GIA-trained lapidary team in Nepal. Every stone in the catalog passes through at least two of their hands before it is sealed into a parcel.
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Head of Lapidary
Anish Bhattarai
GIA Graduate Gemologist · 22 years at the bench · son of the founder
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Certification Lead
Purna Bhattarai
GIA Graduate Gemologist · ICA member · daughter of the founder
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Senior Gemologist · Rough Intake
Rajan Shrestha
GIA Graduate Gemologist · 19 years · built the rough-grading protocol
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Recovery & Re-cutting Lead
Mira Tamang
GIA Graduate Gemologist · runs the 800-stone-per-month recovery floor
Vertical Integration
From a Ganesh-Himal riverbed to a signed certificate — one roof.
Most aquamarines change hands four to six times between mine and buyer. Ours change hands once. That is the entire price advantage.
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Stage One
Rough intake & provenance
Each crystal arrives with a mine tag naming the river valley and the date it left the ground. Rajan logs weight, crystal habit, and visible inclusions against the house's 1978-vintage grading ledger. Stones that cannot be traced to a named Himalayan source are returned to the supplier. Roughly one in eight parcels fails this step.
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Stage Two
Planning & hand-cutting
Before any diamond touches the stone, Anish plots the cut on a Sarin report to protect color and minimize weight loss. Most aquamarines from the house leave the bench as emerald cuts, step cushions, or elongated ovals — shapes chosen to keep the gem's natural cool blue rather than to chase maximum yield.
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Stage Three
Polishing & pre-certification
After final polish, each stone is weighed, measured, and graded in-house against GIA's Colored Stone Grading System. Stones that do not meet the catalog's minimum clarity and color standards are sent to Mira's recovery floor for re-cut or cabochon conversion — over 800 rough pieces pass through that workshop every month.
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Stage Four
Certification & shipment
Every stone over one carat ships with a signed Certificate of Authenticity, a provenance map naming the source valley, and the lapidary who cut it. Parcels leave Kathmandu twice a week, insured, to customers in 67 countries — most arriving within five business days of dispatch.
Provenance Promise
“A gemstone with no paper trail is a story half-told. We sign every certificate because a buyer's daughter should be able to ask, forty years from now, exactly which mountain her mother's stone came from — and we should still have the answer.”
Hari Bhattarai Founder, Aquamarine Nepal
- ICA Member since 2003
- 3 × GIA Graduate Gemologists on staff
- Lifetime buyback on stones over 2 ct
House History
Five quiet dates that opened the door to the world.
A short institutional backbone — for press, wholesale buyers, and collectors who like to know the dates before they look at the stone.
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1978
Workshop opens on Patan Dhoka Marg
Hari Bhattarai installs a single faceting machine in a one-room workshop in Lalitpur. The first decade cuts what the local trade brings.
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2003
ICA membership
The house is elected to the International Colored Gemstone Association, formalizing its ethical-sourcing standards and giving wholesale buyers a recognized counterparty.
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2009
First international shipment
A consignment of twenty-six certified aquamarines is air-freighted to a single boutique jeweler in Antwerp — the first of 380 trade partners across 27 countries the house now serves.
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2022
JCK Rising Houses
Jewelers' Circular Keystone names Aquamarine Nepal to its Rising Houses list, the first Nepalese house to appear in the feature.
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2023
Best Online Gemstone Retailer — Asia
The Asian Jewellery Excellence Awards recognizes the house for direct-to-collector pricing and end-to-end provenance documentation. The online catalog passes 1,200 certified stones.