At Musée Living, we are in the business of moments — of building places where people feel something they will still be describing to a friend years later. So we pay attention to people who spend their whole lives chasing the impossible and somehow catching it. In August 2026, we lost one of the greatest of them, and we wanted to say thank you.
His name was Nirmal "Nims" Purja. Nepal knew him, and the climbing world knew him, simply as Nimsdai — "big brother Nims."
Nims was born in 1983 in a small village in the Himalayas of Nepal, into a family so poor that his older brothers worked to pay for his school — a boy who, for years, did not own a pair of shoes. He became a Gurkha, one of the bravest breeds of soldier on earth, and then did what no Gurkha ever had: he passed selection for Britain's most elite special forces unit, the Special Boat Service. He had been told it was impossible. He was the first.
Then the mountains called, and Nims answered with something audacious enough to make the entire climbing world laugh. In 2018 he walked away from his military career — pension, security, all of it — and announced that he would summit all fourteen of the world's mountains above 8,000 metres in seven months. The existing record stood at seven years.
He called it Project Possible. He finished in six months and six days.
Along the way he stood atop Everest, Lhotse and Makalu — three of the tallest peaks on the planet — inside a single forty-eight hours. The fourteen eight-thousanders now behind his name: Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Kangchenjunga, Everest, Lhotse, Makalu, Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum I, Gasherbrum II, Broad Peak, K2, Manaslu, Cho Oyu and Shishapangma. "I am sick," he said, "of people saying things are impossible."
I keep a note with these five lessons on my desk. They are, I think, a philosophy for how to live — and, quietly, how we try to run a hospitality company.
1. Where you start does not decide where you finish. No shoes, no money, no connections — and he became the finest high-altitude mountaineer in history. Beginnings are not verdicts.
2. When they say "impossible," don't argue — go and do it. Nims never debated the doubters. He named the mission Possible and let the summits reply. The best answer to "it can't be done" is proof.
3. Real greatness includes kindness. High in the death zone of Kangchenjunga, he found a climber abandoned in the snow. Everyone else walked past. Nims gave up his own oxygen and carried the man down on his back for six hours, saving his life. "Even at the top of the world," he said, "there is still a human zone." That single sentence is the whole of hospitality.
4. Rise — and lift your people with you. He led the first-ever winter ascent of K2 with an all-Nepali team, and on the summit they sang their national anthem. He wept, not for himself, but so the world would finally see Nepal's Sherpas and guides as the greatest climbers alive, not as porters.
5. A life fully lived beats a life spent being careful. Nims knew the mountains could take him. On Broad Peak, in August 2026, an avalanche did. He climbed anyway — because the goal was never to be safe. It was to be fully, unmistakably alive.
That is the thread that runs through everything we build at Musée Living — from a sixteen-room boutique hotel to a mountain café at the edge of the road in Tosh. Not more rooms. More aliveness.
🌙 For the Next Generation
So kids everywhere can fall asleep to the tale of the boy with no shoes who touched every sky — and grow up believing nothing is impossible. It's free to listen on My Sleepy Tale, our family's bedtime-story platform.
🎧 Listen — "The Man Who Touched Every Sky"Thank you, Nimsdai — for the fourteen summits, for the man you carried down, for the country you made proud, and for reminding all of us that "impossible" is only ever a dare.
The mountains gave Nims everything. In the end, they took him home.
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