Westhaven - the Advance of the Retreat
There are all sorts of different lodges in New Zealand. The mainstream mega-lodges are as well known and well marketed as the Great Walks, with resultant crowds beating a path to their door. These are usually beautiful places with lovely service but can suffer a little from "corporateness" and your fellow guests can be similarly similar.
Personally, and this is just one punter's opinion, I prefer the smaller, more intimate, quirky places, more rooted in the earth of this land. Usually the result of one person's or a family's vision. Westhaven is one of these. Not listening to mainstream media, to after-the-fact market trend reporting, but listening to their own hearts, this family has taken a very special part of New Zealand and presented it to international travellers in their own way.
And it works.
Set right at the very end of a spectacular road, this peninsula has to be one of the most gorgeous pieces of land in New Zealand. Added to that, you have a family which takes whatever it does as far as it possibly can - and you have an over-engineered, nearly bomb-proof lodge with views that leave you short of breath. They have been working their piece of land for decades and introduce lucky travellers to hikes, picnics, fishing and other natural, undoctored pastimes. And they have the fittings, service and cuisine to pamper princesses.
I'd like to keep this a secret and ensure room at the lodge for our future clients. But these guys have put so much work and so much love into what they have created that they deserve the recognition, the praise and the accolades which are rightfully theirs.