Hildebrandt’s

When architect Louis Hay designed Hildebrandt’s in 1933, he wasn’t really building Art Deco at all, despite Napier’s reputation as an Art Deco capital. While his colleagues embraced the fashionable zigzags and geometric motifs of the era, Hay was quietly mining Frank Lloyd Wright folios he’d acquired in 1912, drawing from Prairie Style and Chicago School designs that predated the trend by decades. The result? A building that looks perfectly at home among Napier’s 111 post-earthquake structures, yet stands apart, much like Hay himself, who cut a dashing figure strolling Tennyson Street in white suits with his fox terrier, Spark.

The earthquake that made all this necessary struck on February 3, 1931, and did its damage in two and a half minutes, killing 256 people and lifting 40 square kilometers of seabed into dry land. Napier’s own architects, Hay among them, insisted on rebuilding the city themselves rather than handing the job to outsiders, and the result is now on UNESCO’s tentative list for World Heritage status, a recognition still pending rather than confirmed. Hay got his Art Deco credentials by accident, borrowing a style he never much believed in to disguise a building he’d been dreaming up since before the earthquake was a possibility anyone had considered.