PERMISSION DENIED

Peter Thiel’s Plans for Sprawling Luxury Lodge Buried by Environmentalists

The billionaire’s dream home design was deemed to be “inappropriately dominant” to its surroundings.

Peter Thiel’s plans for a vast luxury lodge by a scenic lake in New Zealand have been scuttled by environmentalists. The PayPal billionaire and GOP Senate backer was refused resource consent for the home at Damper Bay near Wanaka on the South Island because the lodge would create “sufficient adverse landscape and visual effects on the environment,” independent commissioners for Queenstown Lakes District Council ruled. “It will be of a sufficiently large scale and impact that it will draw the eye and be inappropriately dominant,” the ruling added. The home’s design by Kengo Kuma & Associates—the Japanese architects who also designed the Tokyo Olympics stadium—had previously ditched plans for a meditation pod in order to reduce the lodge’s impact on the environment, to no avail.