Murrells Grand View House

Arriving on foot from the Doubtful Sound departure point takes about six minutes, and many guests do exactly that before or after their cruise, leaving car and luggage at the house. Grand View House was built in 1889 by Bob Murrell to shelter the first travellers to Manapouri, and it has operated as a guesthouse ever since. Robert and Philippa Murrell, fifth-generation hosts, now run the four-room property much as their forebears did, with old photographs of past generations lining the walls. The house sits in three acres of garden above Lake Manapouri. Each of the four en-suite rooms looks out over lake, mountain or garden; two lake-view rooms and two garden-view rooms make up the count, all on the ground floor and none fitted with a television, by design. Breakfast is served in the dining room, built around local free-range eggs and the Murrells' own preserves, and guests often linger at the table swapping notes with travellers from elsewhere. Te Anau is a twenty-minute drive; Milford Sound is roughly two and a half hours by road. Manapouri itself holds a shop, a bar and café, a bookshop and not much else, which suits guests headed out early for the fiords. In the evening the veranda faces the water, and the sky over Fiordland turns properly dark for stargazing.