New Zealand · Wine Country
Hawke's Bay
Gentleman-farmer country: serious wine, deep comfort.
The Region
Hawke’s Bay is where New Zealand keeps its Bordeaux blends and its finest Chardonnays. It is gentleman-farmer country, all limestone hills, art deco Napier and long lunches that started as tastings. Accommodation runs from working homesteads to clifftop lodges, and the artisans — smokehouses, olive presses, potteries — are exceptional.
It is the North Island’s easiest region to love and one of the easiest to under-design. The difference lies in whose table you sit at, and at what hour you meet the gannets.
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A Moment We Design
Gannets at sunrise
Cape Kidnappers hosts one of the largest mainland gannet colonies anywhere — thousands of birds wheeling off the cliff edge at first light. You arrive overland at dawn, before anyone else, coffee in hand, and watch the morning shift take off.
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A Moment We Design
The homestead table
A restored country homestead on its own farmland, dinner cooked from the property, and rooms that remember a hundred years of Hawke’s Bay hospitality. This is the region at its truest register: unhurried, generous, quietly grand.
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A Moment We Design
The clifftop farm
Behind the famous golf course, Cape Kidnappers is a 6,000-acre working sheep station with its own wildlife sanctuary. An afternoon out on the farm (shepherds, dogs, kiwi conservation and cliff-edge views) pairs unreasonably well with the cellar afterwards.
When To Come
The season is part of the design
Harvest (February to April) is the region’s great season: fruit on the vines, winemakers busy but talkative, and the light turning everything to honey.
The gannets keep their own calendar, roughly September to April. February brings Napier’s art deco festival, when the whole city dresses for 1931.
Where You Might Stay
The lodges that live here
A handful of the places we place guests in Hawke's Bay. Each carries a dossier: who it suits, the nights it deserves, how we set it inside a journey.
Design your journey
Tell us what pulled at you here. We'll design the journey around it, with the right people waiting when the helicopter lands.
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