The Pullman footprint at the corner of Waterloo Crescent and Princes Street in Auckland Central is actually two footprints. The Pullman Hotel fronts along the Waterloo Crescent thouroghfare. In my opinion, the hotel’s exterior is dull and unadorned compared to the elegance of the hotel’s interiors. The interiors are richly appointed.

Astride the Princes Street corridor of the complex are the Pullman Residences, two and three bedroom apartments available for short- and long-stay accomodations. The Princes Street facade, a detail of which is pictured here, is quite distinctive.

The cantilevered porches and roof line have been designed to express an uncluttered but maximal visual statement. The white overlapping porches produce strong contrasts of light and shadow - a dramatic interplay of tonal extremes which makes for a powerful black & white photograph.

The visual impact of the facade is further heightended by the interplay of varied lengths in the porch forms - from long and bevelled lengths on the left that approximate rectilinear shapes to porch length of subtle but increasingly shortened length as the eye moves from left to right. The irregular patterns propel the visual movement of the facade.

The capstone design element, which for me accentuates the impression that the segments are floating, is the repeating pattern of angled edges on the left-hand side of each smaller porch segment. As a design conseqence, the porch enclosures are rendered as irregular quadrilaterals. That syncopated rhythm of irregular porch forms creates a dynamic tension, an imbalance within the visual plane of the facade that further enhances the vibrant impression of movement and suspension.

Lastly, an echo of cantilevered forms can be seen in the roof line. The seductive curve of each roof segment is lovely. Again we see an interplay, and resulting tension, of opposites - the straight line that forms the left-edge of each roof segment from which a delicate curvilinear portion extends and defines the shape.

The Pullman Residences facade is a refined example of visually stunning architectural design.

For much of our 47 years together my wife and I have had a satisfying division of labour. Randolph enjoys cooking, and she is a superb chef. She also loathes the chore of dinner clean-up. In a moment of contrite confession she has admitted that, in the course of meal preparation, her habit of using every sauce pan — every kitchen utensil no matter how well hidden from reach — is a baked-in culinary reflex. Her dread of facing the kitchen carnage of an impeccably prepared meal is palpable. Fair enough, the dude does the dishes.

Not to worry . . . I not only enjoy immensely her culinary creations, I also relish the time of quiet reverie or splashes of jazz music via AirPods that attend the Sisyphian task of post-feast kicthen restoration.

I am also the partner who sets the dinner table, an easy task when place settings are limited to two persons, but the chore is within my dinnertime remit. Therefore, I was especially attentive when I saw the gentleman featured in today’s photograph begin to set his table, a reclusive edge of a pedestrian lane that connects Queen and High Streets. His Fanta drink marked one edge of his table, followed by the makings of his mains - a collection of fast food favourtites - gingerly placed in other quadrants.

With equal alacrity he set himself on the hard sidewalk, surveyed his dinner victuals and began to eat with relentless intensity what was likely his sole rations of the day.

New Zealand was the first self-governing country to grant women the right to vote in national elections. It did so by act of parliament in 1893.

Khartoum Place in Auckland Central memorialises this momentous moment in the worldwide suffrage movement, which took root in the 19th century, to expand the Enlightenment ideal of political equality by extending full political agency to New Zealand women.

A different form of movement — a visual movement — capivated me as I approached the plaza from the Auckland Art Gallery. I had been reflecting on my study of an Hungarian born photographer, Gyula Halász, who as an expatriate living in Paris produced a portfolio of stunning black & white photographs of Paris at night and published them under the pseudonym Brassaï.

Brassaï’s oeuvre is hauntingly beautiful, each print an evocative play of form, line and light. The finest black & white photographs — think of Ansel Adam’s images — exploit the full range of the gray scale, from pure black to pure white. Brassaï’s photographs are marked by spectacular washes of light, shadow and granular texture, all impeccably composed.

If imitation is a high form of flattery, then my humble attempt here should be understood to be a modest but sincere nod to Brassaï’s photographic legacy.

Storefront windows are the visual business cards for retail shops. At their best streetside windows extend seductive invitations to linger, to consider and ultimately to be drawn within.

The cafe window at the Addis Cafe and Ethiopian Restaurant plays on the Kiwi addiction to excellent, if not also exotic, coffee. The demitasse coffee cup signals just that: the coffee will be small-portioned but full bodied. The message is brilliant: complex and layered flavours are best sipped slowly, are best savoured.

The display of the restaurant menu on the plate glass is prosaic but clever. It announces that the party for the senses extends beyond a prized liquid to Ethiopian spiced meats and vegetarian offerings.

A lovely Sunday afternoon put me in the mood for a train ride and a photography walkabout. I elected to travel by rail to Kingsland, an Auckland suburb that is home to Eden Park, New Zealand’s national stadium. Football (soccer) and rugby teams, including sell-out crowds for the All Blacks, play matches at Eden Park.

An elaborate stairway superstructure routes passengers from the train station platform to city street. At the apex of the stairway, I spotted a potential photograph in the alley below.

The side alley of a building, which is host to the Taiko Japanese Restaurant, contained what one might expect of an urban alley: an HVAC unit mounted on the exterior wall; the makeshift placement of an exhaust vent in a window pane with cluttered window ledge; various pipes and electrical conduits; and an ageing sidewalk.

The ornamental surprise, which alley ways often conceal to the less curious and observant pedestrian, included a pair of handsomely stencilled windows (perhaps depicting slender bamboo trees) and a very attractive potted bonsai tree - fixtures befitting of a Japanese restaurant.

While finding the proper angle from which to capture the image was difficult — there were numerous obstacles that encumbered my view — I am reasonably satisfied with the photographic outcome.

The bungalow is a marvel of humble charm. While plain yet admirably efficient in both interior and exterior design, the bungalow displays puncutated elements of elegant character.

The front veranda (or more modestly the front porch) may best claim that combination of functional brilliance and elaborate craft aesthetic. From a functional perspective, the overhang of the street-facing veranda shades the interior from the voracity of the summer sun and defines the lineaments of a front porch that encouarges a bungalow’s residents to sit outside in shaded comfort to enjoy the views of front yard and sidewalk beyond.

Furthermore, the veranda includes horizontal trim board and vertical posts that beg for artistic embellishment, and the Kiwi bungalow stands out in this regard. Borrowing from the Arts & Crafts style, the trim board and posts are adorned with the intricate craftsmanship, often referred to as lacework, of fretwork and brackets. Those elegant features of design and craft aethetic are handsomely illustrated in today’s photograph.

A recent photography walk took me the length of Richmond Road from Grey Lynn to Ponsonby, two of Auckland’s upscale suburbs. I saw lovely examples of villas and bungalows, the styles of residential architecture that typified the housing stock built in Auckland’s suburbs from the late 19th century and across the early decades of the 20th century.

The photograph included in today’s post was amongst my most favoured examples of villa architecture that I spotted during my walk. I am not a sufficiently skilled architectural historian to write with assured confidence, but to my eye the villa depicted here illustrates a transitional period as architects borrowed from established forms but experimented with novel architectural expressions.

I believe that the incorporation of an oriel window within the front facade was not a comnon architectural element of the villa style. It may have been a gesture by the architect to Victorian arts & crafts architecture from which the New Zealand villa style emerged. The elaborate gingerbread trim incorporated within the porch valance and sprandrels are also shared features between the Victorian arts & crafts and villa styles.

On balance, however, the villa and bungalow styles of residential architecture were more modest in size and plain in detail than their antecedents, offering an attractive but less expensive alternative for a burgeoning middle class population that would settle in Auckland’s expanding suburbs in post-World War I New Zealand. The California bungalow provided the perfect template from which to build and innovate.

One final observation: the profusion of flowers in the front yard, in lieu of expansive grassy lawn, is to my way of thinking quite brilliant. It is as if visitors to the home were being invited to walk along a bridal path of well-wishers on their way to the front door of the home.

I found in the front yard of a nearby home further evidence of the neighbourhood’s amiability, as expressed through its street-side gardens. An exquisite Hibiscus flower poked its head out to greet me as I walked by.

The close companion of my SubStack blog will know that I return my focus regularly to my home precinct to photograph Wynyard Quarter, where my wife and I have lived for the past four years. I have been incurably bewitched by the magical ambiance of our seaside neighbourhood.

Wynyard Quarter was conceived as the Western Reclamation, a project to reclaim the tidal shoreline of the Waitematā Harbour at the western-most edge of Auckland Harbour. The marvel of the reclamation project is further dramatised by the adaptive reuse or re-purposing of utilitarian artefacts found throughout the precinct that chronicle the area’s maritime and industrial histories as well as extend each artefact’s utility in aesthetically pleasing manner.

Within the latter category of industrial activity sits a collection of cement silos located within the area of Wynyard Quarter known as Silo Park. It is here in Silo Park that adaptive reuse shines.

Today’s entry features a photograph of several sculptures by architect and sculptor Logan Bow. The display sits at one of the exterior windows of Silo 6, a collection of six tightly compacted cement silos of Silo Park that have been converted into art studio & exhibition space.

Interior arched doorways have been cut in silo walls to create passageways that permit tentative movement amongst the six silos, ensuring that the individual studios can be both isolated and cautiously discovered. Ceilings soar to heights of 35 metres, greatly extenuating the palpable sensations of mystery, enchantment and cavernous disorientation.

Randolph and I plan to attend an upcoming art show at Silo 6, and I will attempt to capture with photographs the alluring charm of the exhibition venue.

I ate once at Coco’s Cantina and was not favourably impressed with the food. That said, the restaurant has a cult following, so my opinion may matter little.

I am impressed with the cantina’s attention to aesthetic detail that makes for a great K Road vibe. That sensibility begins with the presentation of its front facade. In a previous entry, I attempted to capture that feel, beginning with the establishment’s bright orange front door.

On the ocassion of the current blog entry, I focused on two impressions of the cantina’s interior as seen through a plate glass window on the left and an opened passageway on the right.

A saintly depiction in stained glass of the Australian musician Nick Cave sits within the restaurant some distance from the front window. The reflctive distortion of the exterior light against the window, however, makes it appear that the stained glass mural is superimposed eerily on the surface of the glass. The art work anchors the bohemian mood of the interior, but — from the outside — it exudes an other-worldly radiance.

The view through open passageway is equally ethereal and again due largely to lighting, although in this instance the chimerical feel is the result of rather dim lighting. My attempt in post-processing to illuminate the interior rendered the patrons in ghostly relief.

I think my photograph is a quirky nod to the restaurant’s ‘left of cool’ vibe.

Wynyard Quarter has heaps of attractions that draw Kiwis and tourists alike to it. The precinct is Auckland’s harbour-front neighbourhood and seaside playground.

Silo Park is the quintessential expression of the quarter’s twin legacy of maritime activity and light marine industry.

Today’s diptych presents another stellar attraction of Wynyard Quarter - it’s Karanga Harbour Pool and jumping platform.

The focus on the jumping platform not only expresses an interest in keeping cool this summer season but also in preparing for the 2026 World Manu Championship, a dive bomb competition the finals of which will take place at the Karanga Harbour Pool across the weekend of 14 March.

The practice jumpers always attract a crowd of keen spectators.

I don’t know where to begin, which may help explain why I used the title ‘mixing it up.’

The one image element that is likely in the moment is the scattering of pink cowgirl hats. Retail and hospitality shops along the length of Ponsonby Road were preparing for the street parade that evening in celebration of the 2026 Pride Festival in Auckland.

And yes, country music is a thing across New Zealand.

On photography walks that take me across Karangahape (K) Road, I always slow down, if not stop, when I get to the rainbow bus stop.

The translucent coloured panels on either side of the street bathe light in a gossamer shimmer of surprising, if not eerie, beauty. I believe this entry’s photograph captures that visual sensation of diffuse or flat light.

I am also pleased that I was able to convey dramatic visual depth by two means: accentuated differences in scale between foreground and background; and rendering the foreground in soft contrast while imbuing the background with discernable sharpness.

Sometimes a little distance in time leads to a compression of space.

A few days after my initial post of ‘an albratross in flight - Dunedin Harbour’ (entry 430), and after several hard stares at the entry’s image, I decided that I had left too much dead space in the photograph. The initial crop left the albatross, the lighthouse and attendant cottages too indistinct, except when enlarged well beyond the typical screen rendering.

What do my patrons think? I would weclome your opinions.

On one of the days Randolph & I spent recently in Dunedin, we booked the scenic cruise of Dunedin Harbour. The weather was frightful - an atmospheric mix of strong winds, rain and dense fog.

While the violent wind nearly canceled our tour, it summoned a weight of adolescent albatrosses who saw in the fierce air currents opportunities to demonstarte their advancing skills in flight.

I took any number of photographs, but this image pleased me more than others.

May the descendants of Captain William Cargill forgive me - I have elected to forego an exploration of Capatin Cargill’s legacy. For those Substack patrons who wish to learn about Captain Cargill, you may enjoy reading a biographical sketch found here.

I wish instead to focus on the monument itself.

The Cargill Monument was designed by Charles Robert Swyer. It was built between 1863 and 1864. The monument is made from Tasmanian sandstone, resting on a base of local stone called phonolite. The monument stands about 7.5 meters (25 feet) tall.

Although no longer in place, four lamps originally mounted at the edges of the monument’s podium illuminated the landmark and surrounding area of the city-centre street, as illustrated below in a heritage photograph.

Of the monument’s lineage, both architectural and historical, an entry in Heritage New Zealand notes:

Cargill’s Monument, completed in 1864, is a Gothic Revival masterpiece standing at what was once the centre of the Dunedin business district in the late 1800s in the area that was originally known as Custom House Square, now known as the Exchange, at the intersection of Princes and Rattray Streets. The monument, of architectural, aesthetic and historic significance, was built in memory of Captain William Cargill (1784-1860) who, along with the Reverend Thomas Burns (1796?-1871), was the leader of the Otago settlement. It is situated close to the landing site of the waka Arai Te Uru and the location where Cargill had arrived with the first settlers of the Free Church settlement on the John Wickliffe on 23 March 1848.1

From its initial reception onward, the monument has been celebrated, villified, admired and vandalised. Representative of the halting regard for the structure is a newspaper editorial from the time of the monument’s completion (circa 1864), which administered a mixture of faint praise and scathing judgment:

‘The design seemed very pretty, but now that it is erected, one shudders at its ill taste …it is an insult to the memory of Cargill that such a trumpery insubstantial-looking thing should be considered a fitting recognition of his services. 2

The commerative edifice has had in recent years a revival in its stature as an object of civic pride and plans are afoot to restore the monument to its once elegant beauty.

The public toilet as inspiration for public art is a Kiwi thing. The most famous example is that of the Hundertwasser public toilet in the North Island town of Kawakawa. Kiwis on holiday and tourists alike, who head for the Northland region of New Zealand, alter their travel plans in order to see Hundertwasser’s art installation wonder - a composite of recycled bricks, spent glass bottles and ceramic tiles painted in Hunndertwasser’s unique style. The project celebrates an artist’s gratitude for the Northland community that welcomed the Austrian expatriate and later expressed — with the construction of an eponymously named art centre — its adulation for his signature portfolio of visionary proportions.

The focus of today’s entry is another North Island artistic treasure.

In the North Auckland village of Matakana, local artist Stephan de Haan won a design competition (circa 2002) for the construction of a public toilet. Taking inspiration from the boat construction tradition of the area, de Haan’s design echoes the shape and materiality of twin boat hulls. With curvaceous elegance, a pair of cement walls form the entrance way. And, as its crowning design achievement, a pair of cement facial profiles appoint the entrance way.

In the brief time that I studied from across the street the marvelous homage to public art, the toilet was more photographed than utilised.

Long before the Scots founded at the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island the colonial settlement of Dunedin (Scots Gaelic for Edinburgh), the indigenous Māori thrived throughout the South Island region called Otago. Māori settlement in the Otago region dates back almost a millenium, with archaeological evidence suggesting that the region was home to the earliest Māori settlements (circa 13th century) in Aotearoa New Zealand.

With the Otago gold rush of the 1860s, the colonial-era population of Dunedin swelled dramatically, making Dundein the most populous urban centre within New Zealand in the mid-19th century. And within that wave of European immigration to the Otago region, immigrants from Scotland were an outsized population.

The Scots could be noted for two virtues among many - a passion for the promotion of public education for both boys and girls, and religious adherence to the Free Church of Scotland.

The First Church of Otago stands as rapturous tesimonial to that religious foundation. It is a magnicient example of Gothic Revival architecture and specifically the Gothic Decorative style that characterised Gothic architecture of the 19th century.

The view featured at the top of this entry illustrates the elegance of the front facade. I am equally enamoured of the church’s rear facade as viewed from the Queens Garden area of city centre Dunedin.

My wife and I recently returned from a visit to the South Island city of Dunedin. The outsized influence of its earliest settlers from Scotland is apparent everywhere, beginning with the city’s name (Scottish Gaelic for Edinburgh).

The city’s architecture is brilliantly photogenic, and none more so than the Dunedin railway station. Indeed, as it is recorded: “[The Dunedin railway station] is speculated by [Dunedin] locals to be the most photographed building in [New Zealand], as well as the second most photographed in the southern hemisphere, after the Sydney Opera House.” 1

The building, a grand example of Renaissance Revival architecture, is stunningly beautiful inside and out.

The train authority recently restored service from Dunedin to Invercargill, the only New Zealand city to be located closer to Antarctica than Dunedin. Half- and full-day train rides depart daily from the station to the Taieri Gorge and along the eastern coastline of the South Island.

Having never taken advantage of the fabled train ride on the Canadian Pacific Railway — with iconic destinations in Banff, Jasper and Lake Louise, among others — I will redoubled my efforts to return soon to Dunedin and ride the rails.

My compositional decisions in entry 425 — please do not climb ladder — had left me unsettled. I played with the picture’s original composition to produce an off-centre photograph, electing a 5x4 format rather than a centred image within a square format.

I believe I prefer the compositional choices of the image above and not those of the original post, as reproduced below:

I would be delighted to hear from patrons of my Substack.

Which version of the photograph grabs you, assuming either does: the centred or off-centred image?

Yes, I have a fetish for alleys . . . no doubt traceable to my time as a young lad when I wandered my Marine Park (Brooklyn) neighbourhood with my cousin. I do have vivid memories from that time of my childhood.

The modern aesthetic of the front lights on the car at the back of the alleyway reveals the time period in which the photograph was taken. The image otherwise speaks with the vernacular from a previous century.

This photograph was taken recently when Randolph & I were on holiday in Dunedin (NZ).