Napier, New Zealand, revels in its art deco buildings, which helped it cope with destruction from a 1931 earthquake.

BY LUBA VANGELOVA

The Masonic Hotel on Marine Parade at night (Napier City Council)

The manicured gardens along the shoreline are clearly the place to be on this fine Sunday afternoon. Everyone who's anyone is here, darlings, including international socialite Felicity Fothergill Frogbottom, war hero Maj. Dennis Humpley Hyphen Pudge, and renowned aviator Capt. Biggles. Tout le monde mingling beneath the Norfolk Island pines, sipping champagne, sharing intrigues. Biplanes buzzing overhead. Waves crashing in the harbor. The scene is straight out of … Napier, New Zealand, in the 21st century?

Improbable but true. It's best to suspend disbelief when visiting the annual February Art Deco Weekend in this out-of-the-way South Pacific town, midway up the North Island's east coast. The festival brochure cover says it all: This is a "not-too-serious celebration." So it comes as little surprise when the pith-helmeted Maj. Pudge (a.k.a. Napier resident Mark Muir) confesses, "I wouldn't know art deco from my elbow; I just like dressing up and saying silly things." But a moment later he launches into an informed discussion of Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on 20th-century architecture.

Napier's Marine Parade before the 1931 Earthquake (Napier City Council)

And so it goes over the course of four midsummer days in the self-styled art deco capital of the world. Established in 1851, Napier was, until Feb. 3, 1931, a typical New Zealand town dominated by late-Victorian and Edwardian buildings. Then the country's worst natural disaster, an earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, struck the Hawke's Bay region. In Napier alone, 162 lives were lost. By nightfall, the town's central business district lay in ruins, all but a few of its buildings destroyed by the tremors or the ensuing fires.

Once they'd absorbed the initial shock and assessed the damage, the 16,000 residents set about rebuilding their lives and their town, even as the Great Depression arrested construction around the world. People here desperately needed hope. A six-month moratorium on building allowed them time to consider how their new town should look, and they chose an optimistic style that signaled machine-age progress: art deco. To ensure cohesion, the town's four architecture firms formed a consortium. Two years after the earthquake, Napier had 129 sleek new buildings decorated in exuberant motifs—not a bad aesthetic therapy for the community's wounded psyche.

The construction was mostly downtown near the water, the old hillside residential area having survived the earthquake relatively unscathed. Today it still claims some of New Zealand's best-preserved colonial villas. Arriving in Napier on the pre-festival Thursday, I check into the Cobden Villa, a hillside bed-and-breakfast run by two recent California transplants, Cornel and Amy Walewski. The villa's understated white wood facades, bay windows, and green corrugated-iron roof are all Edwardian. Inside, however, it's a deco shrine. Walls erupt in painted stripes, sunbursts, and other designs in hues from the eggplant and olive sections of the palette. Nubile goddesses in silver hold aloft light globes. Breakfast is served on neo-deco '40s pink china. "We're art deco fanatics," grins the cravat- and smoking-jacket-clad Cornel. Soon, he'll begin collecting guests in a '38 Buick, he says.

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