Highden Manor Estate - Highden Manor Estate 220 Green Road

good very good

Awesome venue

Beautiful venue

Great value for money for short stays

Nice service. Beautiful house. Step into house, you feel back to 1900s. Highly recommend.

•No official greeting on arrival except for wedding party. Staff hard to find/identify. Had to wonder around to find where to check-in. •Building exterior is in need of maintenance. Weeds growing out of spouting. There were leaks onto deck making it extremely slippery. Paintwork colour scheme is lovely but does need redoing. •IRIS room floor extremely squeaky. Lots of dead bugs in the centre lights. Two light bulbs not working in the bathroom. •Dinner was ok. Cooked breakfast wasn’t’ worth the money and presentation was very poor, looked like it was put together by 10 year olds. •Such a gorgeous place. Would love to see someone with a lot passion take this place to the next level and turn it into a lively warm welcoming venue that it can be. •Gardens looked amazing. •Interior décor is stunning. •Beautiful peaceful location, and not too from Palmerston North City. •Bed lovely, clean and very comfortable.

I came across this place in the middle of almost nowhere randomly when looking for a place to sleep on my drive back up north from the Wellington ferry terminal in the evening. I didn’t realize the remote country location of this manor when booking. Driving at night, the GPS will get you to entry sign, but the driveway is very long and dark and narrow. When I arrived, it really was a huge manor house and looked beautiful all lit up at night. The sign at the door said to ring the bell and wait in the foyer and someone would come to check me in. Check in was until 9pm and I thought I’d be cutting it close arriving just after 8:30pm. However, I waited almost 10mins and several bell rings later and still no one was there to check me in. There were people in the dining area, so I went in there and got the attention of the gal who looked like she was running the place. She came out and said she’d be right with me…another 10mins later she finally walked me to the office and checked me in. I literally had time to look for and find the restroom, explore the sitting/library area and still wait before I was checked in. I was a bit disappointed to find that the room I had booked was not in the house, but in the “hostel” that is the renovated old servant’s quarters. The free wifi does not reach back there apparently, so you have to go to the main house to use it. Being in the country, the mosquitoes were plenty and fierce and after getting shown my tiny little room, which had two huge spiders and several flying insects inside it, I went to go and use the wifi in the beautiful sitting room. However, because all the windows & doors were open, there were several pesky mosquitoes in there as well, making it impossible to get comfortable. So I decided to go and get ready for bed since I was exhausted. The shared bathrooms are unisex and there are sinks/showers and then two individual toilets separate from the sinks/showers. I was going to take a shower, but there were dead bugs in the shower stalls and there was not a separate place to dry off or change from the shower, so I took a pass. I used one of the toilets and almost had a heart attack when I turned around to flush because there was yet another huge spider by the top of the toilet! Seriously, I was tempted just to go and pop my tent in the backyard and camp because I felt there might be less invasive bugs in my sleeping area! When I went back to my room, the large spiders were still there, but I ended up leaving them be because they were catching some of mosquitoes that were flying in from the window (which I ended up closing even though it got a bit toasty in the room when a giant mosquito decided to dive-bomb my face). Needless to say, $45NZ was way too much to pay for the quality of the room, facilities, and the bug infestation. I did not sleep well at all and honestly would have had a better night in my tent. The manor and grounds were pretty when day broke, but I wanted out of there so bad I didn’t get to enjoy them at all. I’m not sure if staying in the manor would have been any better, but I would not recommend staying in the servant-quarter hostel whatsoever!

Closed gates meant we couldn't get within cooee of the place. All I wanted was a couple of photos of a place that has a connection to my family history.