Tree: Hapuku Lodge

Everyone should get in touch with their fellow primates and spend at least one night in a tree. The only problems with arboreal sleeping (apart from the danger of falling) are that it can be draughty and a bit noisy. So you go to Hapuku, where you’ll find a treehouse with huge showers, double-paned windows, carpets with extra-thick underlays and super-comfy beds with Swedish slats and wool overlays.

You need the double-paned windows because Hapuku sits in the middle of a working deer farm. In rutting season, the stags let out a bellow echoing from the Southern Alps that sounds like some randy Norse god descending from Valhalla. Yet you also want to open the windows at the back to hear the rather gentler roar of the Southern Ocean as it meets the Kaikoura peninsula. As noise pollution goes, this is not a bad choice.

The farm was bought and the lodge built by a family of Kiwi/Californian architects, olive farmers and foodie entrepreneurs. In the US, San Francisco-based Michael Wilson had his own sawmill and a growing collection of rare and interesting woods. There is only so much you can do with a growing collection of rare and interesting woods – such things take up space – so when they started building Hapuku they shipped a load over to go with the plentiful source of prized Australasian species.

So at Hapuku you get a symphony in wood. In the main lodge, rooms and treehouses you will encounter furniture and artworks made from black walnut, Canadian maple, English walnut, local and Tasmanian oak, kahikatea (New Zealand white pine), elm, chestnut and sycamore. This once featureless stretch of farmland is now guarded by Totara trees. On the property there are two kinds of tree ferns, lancewood, pohutukawa (a remarkable and protean species known as ‘the New Zealand Christmas tree’), kanuka and manuka.

I don’t know if wood tourism is ever going to be a big phenomenon, but if you are drawn to travel the world experiencing interesting timber, Hapuku has to be on your bucket list. And it’s not even the main attraction. Some 12 kilometres down the road is the town of Kaikoura, known with some justice as ‘the marine Serengeti’, such is the abundance of marine life and sea birds cavorting in the nutrient-rich waters swelling up from the Hikurangi Trench.