But also where you’ll be bowled over by the obscenely comfortable and beautiful design that is a lesson in easy-going elegance. This place is a ‘pinch-me-am-I-dreaming’ kind of place.
It’s the smartest, most heavenly lodge – with snazzy farm cottages, all decked out in the most stylish way imagineable with big decks to spend the day – week on – relaxing. There are beaches, forests and sheep mooching around, and bikes and boats and horses to gallop about on.
Plus one of the best golf courses the world has to offer, with a clubhouse designed by Virginia Fisher that is brimming with design inspiration and ideas to steal.
Once you’ve driven up to the winding 8km of mesmerizing Designed by Auckland architect Andrew Patterson to look like farm buildings, the interiors by Aspen-based interior designer Linda Bedell are absurdly smart.
There’s an abundance of raw materials – timber, metal, stone, glass, leather, linen, rattan, wool, hide and fur – where the exposed beams and rustic fittings imbue the space with rugged warmth. It is totally in tune with how we want our living spaces to look (and feel). It doesn’t get any more authentic than this; you can trek through the mountains spying the world’s biggest colony of gannet birds. There’s white water rafting, mountain biking, fly fishing, kayaking, clay shooting or a top gun adrenalin-charged, four-wheel spin around the property for those who seek a James Bond holiday, and want an experience they’ll talk about for the rest of their life.
For others, there are deep sofas, enormous beds, quiet summerhouses, a glinting swimming-pool and a serene spa with great treatments and lovely hands providing lavender scrubs, mud wraps and relaxation massages.landscape from the electronic front gates, the barn-style lodge rises with the hilltop suites clustered nearby.
It’s what today’s luxury traveller wants (no longer does a shady palm or swim-up bar pool do the trick). We crave constant engagement in our spare time as much as we do in the workplace.
Lodge life is an opportunity to learn, indulge, blow off steam and, in the age of Facebook and Instagram, digitally boast a bit. Come for the full lodge experience (action, comfort, spa, setting) and leave happier and healthier. The combination of creamy-hued stone and candelight calm, make it a lodge, to fall in love with. Oh and also well worth investigating is it’s event line-up this winter: including annual Interior Design and Garden Weekends when two of Australia’s biggest talents – Thomas Hamel and Paul Bangay – team for garden and design talks, property jaunts discussing the foliage and interiors, and an excursion to Hawke’s Bay with a firm focus on design.
