New found land
Neil Collins considers buying a holiday home in Canada So along comes another of those Lim bonus things Ten a penny, so to speak, in the City nowadays, and the real challenge is to find something imaginative to do with it, preferably something you can show off to your friends, in a low-key sort of way, of course. You've got the agreeable house in Fulham, or even Chelsea if you beat the boom and got in early, and somehow you can't face the hassle of a country house, and as for a cottage ... well, that's no good for weekends when you want to impress your well-heeled chums; it's nothing like glamorous enough.
There's the chalet in Meribel, or Chamonix if you're serious on skis, but the snow is getting so unreliable in Europe these days, isn't it? Summer mountaineering around Mont Blanc is jolly hard work, especially if you'd rather be playing golf, or even trying to catch a fish. If this sort of logic sounds a bit thin, it didn't to Brian Dobbin. Forget Europe, you City boys, and come to Canada.
Dobbin's dream site is six hours flying time from Gatwick, frightfully unfashionable, and five years ago there was nobody else there. There are now. Deer Lake airport, Newfoundland, is charming, and an airline called Astraeus is cheerful, if somewhat primitive. The hardy, well-heeled and mostly British souls who bought into his dream have made a handy 50 per cent on their capital from Humber Valley Resort's real estate building plots.
With 200 dead luxy houses now built, the place hardly squares with the image the word 'resort' conjures up. It's carved out of Newfoundland's native woodland, with a spectacular golf course threaded through the middle of it, almost unlimited national park forest behind it, and reached over its own private bridge across the Humber river.
Brian would be happy for you to buy 15 Riverside Drive, set in 2.1 acres, for C$2.1 110 THE SPECTATOR 15-29 December 2007 Ne\ „ lk , .‘..r7\ 11'1; -T-- 16.7"-•-• -... -. 4..'
V-- -'-‘•:17-e-.. , 6.• A', --74".".4911411.111.4as -57" million, which is rather more than the present owner paid to have it built. If you prefer, he'll sell you lot 446, a site on Valley Drive, for C$510,000, and arrange to have the 2,204 sq ft Mountain Getaway three-bed patternbook house put up on it and fitted out to a high specification for C$382,350. A further C$56,700 plus tax is needed to furnish it.
Don't laugh. He's sold quite enough to make the development viable and, for all I know, you may already be too late for 15 Riverside Drive. The man is serious, and there's far more to the place than golf and the chance to rub shoulders with similarly well-heeled owners. Snow in Newfoundland is guaranteed the way the cod used to be before they overfished the Grand Banks. There's six feet of the stuff in an average year, and some pretty decent skiing is a short drive away in your essential 4x4 (about C$120 a day). It may not quite be Les Trois Vallees, but there's more room, and the natives are notably friendlier.
Humber Valley Resort describes itself as 'this impossibly private playground', and it is. There are lots of grown-up toys in the playground, like restaurants, bars and (says Brian) an indoor pool opening by 2008. Outside the resort, the playground extends further than you'd ever want to snowmobile, and whalewatching is a few hours' easy drive away.
Unfortunately for some of us, the fish are extra. Canada has plenty of salmon (proper Atlantic salmon, not like those on the other side of the continent which mostly end up in tins) but any local can go for them for a mere C$20 a year. This makes the more accessible rivers almost comically crowded, and even in the remote ones, which you reach by helicopter, you may encounter a few hardy locals who have marched for hours through soggy scrub from the nearest track. Foreigners must hire a guide for C$200 a day plus tip, and owning one of Brian's swanky houses doesn't qualify you as a local. You can't just stroll down to the Humber and cast a fly, but at least the guides are well worth their money for the remote rivers. They really want you to catch fish, and will try to talk them into submission if all else fails.
The helicopter rides are pretty entertaining, too, and even C$1,500 an hour is not as steep as it sounds, since you only pay when the bird is airborne, and it carries up to five passengers. The landscape is awesome; fly over one of a tiny handful of places on the planet where the mantle has broken through the earth's crust, and you're grateful it hasn't appeared too often; the hillsides are an angry red colour, and almost nothing grows. Watching your pilot set down on a boulder-strewn river bed is to see an artist at work.
Humber Valley is probably still in the phase where more building enhances the value of what's there rather than reducing it. Compared with other boltholes for the rich, it's excellent value and, unlike so many of such places scattered round the globe, it doesn't feel like an alien bubble which none of the locals could ever afford to enter. And if space really is the final frontier, there's more of it here than almost anywhere on earth where you might want to stay.
, Air 1111111111101111111111 HUMBER VALLEY www.humbervalley.com
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