A to Zealand: Golf, sheep, doomsday preppers, now a top hotel brand Kiwi country has it all

Over the last decade or so, New Zealand’s fantasy landscapes have been transformed by twin aristocratic American obsessions: golf and doomsday. Billionaires and tech oligarchs, half aware of the social destruction their own companies have wrought, bought up tracts of Middle Earth-like terrain to build bug-out bunkers far from potential conflict zones.At the same time, New Zealand was attracting a fresh generation of wealthy golf fanatics.They saw those same dramatic ocean cliffsides and rugged turf and instead of thinking about the end of the world, told their caddies to pass the mashie.Exclusive new clubs opened — and then kept opening.

New Zealand is now home to more than a dozen world-renowned, marquee courses.That American-fueled momentum isn’t likely to slow.Earlier this year, the government of New Zealand relaxed the rules for its roughly $3 million golden visa program (officially Active Investor Plus).

Since then, some 700 foreigners have bought the right to call themselves Kiwis, most of them Yanks.Those deep-pocketed Americans considering an escape from the topsy-turvy US of A for the calm of Southern Hemisphere sheep pastures and the taste of manuka honey are now drawing global luxury hotel brands to New Zealand for the first time.At the close of 2023, Hong Kong-based luxury hotel brand Rosewood took over operation of three of the nation’s most storied resorts and golf clubs: Kauri Cliffs in the blustery Bay of Islands at the tippy top of Kiwi country; Cape Kidnappers set high on the cliffs over wine-soaked Hawke’s Bay and Matakauri hidden in the woods along Lake Wakatipu below the ski slopes of Queenstown.It was big news for a country whose luxury lodges have long operated as family affairs (there’s nary a Four Seasons in this corner of the antipodes).Still, it’s taken time for the word to spread.Each of those resorts was born from an earlier wave of American investment in New Zealand.

In the first decade of the 2000s, the late Ameri...