Curated Itinerary
Napier Art Deco: a walk through the rebuilt city
See Napier’s finest Art Deco facades and interiors, from the historic district’s overview through the Daily Telegraph Building, Municipal Theatre and National Tobacco Company Building to the seafront Masonic Hotel, all within easy walking distance.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Napier Art Deco Historic Area to National Tobacco Company Building, Napier, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
The 3.9 km walk through central Napier takes about 145 minutes and links five buildings that define the city’s Art Deco reconstruction after the 1931 Hawke’s Bay earthquake. Start at the Napier Art Deco Historic Area, a central business district rebuilt between 1931 and 1933 with a uniform style ranging from Zigzag Art Deco to Spanish Mission Revival. Architects Louis Hay, Atkin & Mitchell, and others produced a precinct now protected as a Category I Historic Heritage Area.
Continue to the Napier Municipal Theatre on Tennyson Street, completed in 1938 to a design by J.T. Watson in Art Deco and Streamline Moderne. A short walk south brings you to the Daily Telegraph Building, built in 1932 with a vertical tower, sunburst motif, and relief panels of dolphins and a fountain by architect E.A. Williams. Both buildings hold Category I status with Heritage New Zealand.
Head east to the Masonic Hotel, rebuilt in 1932 by Prouse & Wilson with Norman Wilson credited for much of the design. Its low symmetrical block faces Marine Parade with a timber pergola on the first floor. Finish at Ahuriri, where the National Tobacco Company Building of 1933 by J.A. Louis Hay combines Art Deco geometry with Art Nouveau ornament, including an arched entrance framed in sculpted roses and raupo bulrushes. The route works best during the summer months, with February’s Art Deco Festival drawing the largest crowds.
Read the article
The magazine has a longer piece on this walk: A Walk through Napier’s Rebuilt Art Deco Centre.
Step by step
Napier Art Deco Historic Area
On 3 February 1931, a magnitude-7.8 earthquake levelled the centre of Napier and killed 256 people, leaving the city a field of rubble. What followed was one…
Napier Municipal Theatre
Born from catastrophe and rebuilt in the architectural language of its moment, the Napier Municipal Theatre stands as one of the most evocative monuments to…
Daily Telegraph Building, Napier
The Daily Telegraph Building is the iconic centerpiece of one of the best-preserved Art Deco city centers in the world. Napier, New Zealand was almost…
Masonic Hotel, Napier
Burned in 1896, flattened and burned again in 1931, reborn in Deco in 1932: the Masonic holds the corner of Napier’s seafront with a wooden pergola on its…
National Tobacco Company Building, Napier
Out of the rubble of the 1931 earthquake, a tobacco magnate demanded the most beautiful building in New Zealand — and got it: Louis Hay’s arched doorway…
Download for tour navigation
PDF is the stop list with GPS, to print or keep on the phone. GPX for Garmin / Komoot / OsmAnd. KML for Google Earth and Maps.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
To keep the route in the app instead of opening it once, download the KML above and import it into Google My Maps — Create a new map, then Import: the route then sits among your own maps in Google Maps, with the stops and our notes attached to each one.