New Zealand: Unique Places to Stay

March 13, 2026
New Zealand
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🗺️ Introduction

There is a certain type of person who, when faced with a choice between a perfectly comfortable hotel room and something shaped like a giant shoe, will immediately choose the shoe. I am, it turns out, that person. Karen, to her credit, has largely gone along with this over the years, though her enthusiasm does vary — particularly when the accommodation involves stairs that move in ways stairs really shouldn’t.

New Zealand, it must be said, seems purpose-built for this sort of thing. The country has an enthusiastic relationship with the unusual, a tolerance for the eccentric, and a remarkable number of people who have looked at old farm buildings, retired aircraft, and assorted oddities and thought: I know, I’ll turn that into somewhere people can sleep. Over the course of our time on the North and South Islands, we stayed in five places that no normal travel brochure would describe as “standard”. What follows is an honest account of each one.

🥾 The Boot — Jester House, Tasman (South Island)

There comes a point in a man’s life when he finds himself standing in a field, staring at a giant boot, and thinking: yes. Yes, this is where I shall sleep tonight. The Boot at Jester House in the Tasman region is, as the name suggests, a holiday accommodation shaped like an enormous boot. Not metaphorically. Not loosely inspired by. Literally shaped like a boot — a great big thing, rendered in timber and paint and what I can only assume was a very entertaining planning application. The design draws from the old nursery rhyme about the old woman who had so many children she didn’t know what to do. From the outside the building looks faintly ridiculous, which is the best possible kind of ridiculous. It sits there with complete confidence, as though it has always been there and it is you who is the odd one out for finding it unusual. Which, frankly, you are.

Inside, however, it is genuinely, properly cosy. There is a living room with comfortable furniture — the sort you can actually sit in — along with a well-equipped kitchenette and a bathroom that someone has clearly thought about. Upstairs, via a compact spiral staircase that requires reasonable knees (mine are getting less reasonable by the year), the bedroom is tucked into the toe of the boot. It sounds as though it ought to be claustrophobic and strange, but it is instead charming, snug, and surprisingly spacious. The whole property sits within the grounds of Jester House, an occasional café with wonderfully whimsical gardens full of quirky sculptures and generous planting. The Boot is, in short, far better than it has any right to be, which is more than can be said for quite a lot of four-star hotels I could mention.

🛖 Rocky Creek Shepherd’s Hut — Fox Glacier, West Coast (South Island)

We arrived at Fox Glacier in the late afternoon having driven the Haast Pass from Wanaka — a road that crosses the lowest point of the Southern Alps and hugs the West Coast with the Tasman Sea on one side and dense native bush on the other. Fox Glacier village announced itself modestly. A main street, a few signs, and one good coffee. We were staying in a Shepherd’s Hut — a beautifully restored example of the sort once used by itinerant farmworkers across Britain and rural New Zealand, designed to be pulled by horse to wherever the sheep happened to be. This one had been sympathetically restored, and the care taken showed.

It was small and cosy in the way that only genuinely small spaces can be when someone has thought carefully about every centimetre. At one end a compact bathroom, at the other a bed running the full width of the hut. I had chosen to sleep on the far side against the wall, which meant any nocturnal expedition required negotiating Karen first. I resolved, sensibly, to stay put until morning. The wallpaper was bold and patterned — not quite my usual taste, but here it worked perfectly. An electric fire occupied the spot where a wood-burning stove might once have lived, glowing away convincingly while requiring nothing more than a switch. No firelighters. No damp kindling. Just warmth, on demand. Outside, the Southern Alps rose up in a manner that could only be described as showing off. Back in the village after our walk to the glacier, we stopped at the pub. Fox Glacier has a pub. It is entirely justified in existing.

🚀 The Apollo 11 Space Ship — Twizel, Canterbury (South Island)

Twizel is not what you would call charming in a chocolate-box sense. It was put together in the late 1960s as a temporary town for workers building the Upper Waitaki hydroelectric scheme. The idea had been to remove it once the dams were finished. Sensibly, that never happened. We had booked the Apollo 11 Space Ship Airbnb, which sat in a perfectly ordinary street looking as though it had taken a wrong turn somewhere above the Tasman Sea. From the outside it was a round, metallic structure, clearly inspired by a flying saucer. Not a precise replica of the real command module, which carried Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins to the Moon and back — this one was designed for weekend guests and came with a kettle, which I consider progress.

Getting inside required climbing a small set of external steps, which felt rickety underfoot. They moved more than I would have liked. Karen stopped halfway up and looked at them with deep suspicion. I tried to look confident and supportive while quietly agreeing with her. Inside, the circular space had built-in seating, a compact kitchen, a bed, and a small bathroom. The theme was present but not overdone. However, we did notice fairly quickly that the cleanliness was not quite up to scratch. Not disastrous, but not spotless. A few areas had been missed. For a novelty stay, one expects fun. For the price, one also expects a proper clean. We were both quietly disappointed. The other draw of Twizel is its position within the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, where on a clear night the Milky Way is spectacular. It was cloudy. Of course it was.

🌾 SiloStay — Little River, Canterbury (South Island)

About an hour after leaving the main road behind and trundling through increasingly rural scenery, we reached SiloStay. When someone tells you that you’ll be sleeping in a silo, your mind does not immediately leap to comfort. It imagines draughts, the faint smell of cattle feed, and perhaps the odd pigeon. That assumption would have been entirely wrong. SiloStay consists of eight former grain silos that once served the local farming community in the Canterbury plains, tall corrugated metal towers standing upright in a neat row. No attempt has been made to disguise their origins, which I rather appreciated. If you are going to sleep in a silo, you may as well admit it.

Inside, however, it was a different story. Each silo had been transformed into a vertical one-bedroom apartment spread over several levels — a kitchen and bathroom at ground level, a lounge above, and at the very top, beneath the curved roof, the bedroom. No hay bales. No sacks of barley. Just a proper bed under a curved metal ceiling. Large windows had been cut into the structure, looking out across open countryside with no one peering back. It was wonderfully quiet — the sort of quiet that makes your ears ring slightly because they are not used to it. I could quite happily have stayed longer. It felt like the sort of place where you could read a book, cook something uncomplicated, and avoid the modern world for a bit. At our age, that is not so much a holiday preference as a survival strategy.

🚂 Woodlyn Park Motel — Waitomo, Waikato (North Island)

Our stay at Woodlyn Park was in the tail section of an old Bristol Freighter aircraft, one of the property’s most eye-catching accommodations. The aircraft sits on the hillside, and climbing the short flight of steps into the tail, we found the space to be smaller than we had imagined — narrow and curved, very much reminding us it had once flown in service rather than been designed for guests. Inside were the basics: a modest kitchenette, a compact bathroom, and a small seating area. The overall impression was that it had seen better days. The fittings were a bit tired, the paintwork dated. Character, in other words, but not much polish.

Even so, the charm of sleeping inside a plane made up for its quirks. It felt surreal to lie in bed under the curved ceiling of an old freighter in the quiet Waikato countryside. The plane is not the only thing at Woodlyn Park, which is really a collection of eccentric accommodations gathered together on one property. There are Hobbit units built into grassy mounds with round doors, the Waitanic Ship — a playful nod to the Titanic, constructed from an old boat — and a pair of old railway carriages converted into snug lodgings. Together they make Woodlyn Park one of those places people remember long after they’ve left. It is not polished or perfect, but it has genuine character, and for those who enjoy something different it is exactly the kind of experience worth having once.

🟡 The Yellow Submarine — Marton, Manawatū-Whanganui (North Island)

Karen still had no idea where we were staying, which made the final part of the drive far more entertaining for me than it probably should have been. We turned off the main road near Marton and followed a narrow rural lane through open farmland — low fences, paddocks, very little traffic. It felt like the sort of road you might drive down by mistake and quietly turn around at the first chance. When we finally pulled over, Karen just stopped and stared. Sitting beside the road was a bright yellow submarine. Not a building shaped like one, and not something loosely inspired by the idea, but a full submarine form, painted a solid yellow and looking completely out of place in the middle of the countryside. Against the muted colours of the surrounding farmland it stood out like something that had taken a wrong turn from a Beatles album cover.

We entered through a round hatch at the front, which instantly made it feel like a real vessel rather than novelty accommodation. Inside, built-in seating ran around the curved hull, a small kitchenette was tucked to one side, and two double bunks were built directly into the body of the submarine. A sonar-style ping echoed quietly in the background, and after a bit of experimenting we discovered it could be changed to play various versions of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. That discovery alone justified the stay. Singing along felt unavoidable and slightly ridiculous, which suited the place perfectly. A narrow ladder led up into the control tower, where a captain’s seat — clearly a repurposed barber’s chair — sat next to a mock periscope linked to a camera outside, allowing you to survey the surrounding fields as if submerged. Seeing fences and paddocks through a periscope was oddly entertaining. A full-sized mannequin dressed as John Lennon stood in the main cabin. Impressively made, but slightly unsettling when you caught sight of it unexpectedly from the corner of your eye at two in the morning.

💭 Reflections

New Zealand does quirky accommodation rather well. Better, frankly, than most places we have been. What struck us about the best of these — the Boot, the Shepherd’s Hut, SiloStay, and the Yellow Submarine — was that the people behind them had clearly thought about the experience beyond the novelty. They had made actual, comfortable places to stay, and the unusual shape or material was a bonus rather than the whole point.

The Apollo 11 spaceship was a mild disappointment, mostly down to cleanliness. Woodlyn Park’s plane was fun but tired. Neither was bad exactly — just not quite as good as they could have been with a bit more attention. What all six had in common, though, was that they were memorable. We could tell you what we ate in a dozen forgettable hotel restaurants and remember almost nothing. We could describe every detail of a boot-shaped building in a paddock in Tasman, or a yellow submarine beside a country lane near Marton. That, in the end, is the whole point.