Lake Brunner Eco Lodge is a five-star hotel at Mitchells on Kumara Inchbonnie Road, in the lake country of the Grey district on the West Coast, with details at lakebrunner.co.nz. A good five-star lodge out here is defined by small scale: a handful of rooms rather than a lobby of hundreds, hosts close at hand, and dinners built on what the region grows, often folded into the stay and worth arranging ahead. Genuine eco credentials go further than the label — solar power, water treatment, predator control and native replanting — so it is worth asking what a lodge does for its patch of land. Regulars choose remote lodges for the quiet and the setting: rainforest walks, dark night skies and, on Lake Brunner itself, some of the South Island's best brown trout fishing. Lake Brunner Eco Lodge brings that small-scale, unhurried style of hospitality to the quiet road between Kumara and Inchbonnie, deep in the South Island's West Coast.