Hastings CBD
WestSide
WestSide has some of the finest Art Deco and Moderne facades in Hawke's Bay. Most of them are grey. One man wants to change that — and he's got a track record, a colour sense, and a council grant to help you do it.
Walk down Heretaunga Street West and look up. Above the verandah line, above the shop signs, above eye level... there are fan-type parapets, fluted pilasters, Art Nouveau relief lettering, stepped geometric fins, dentil friezes, and octagonal cartouches. Entire buildings designed by some of New Zealand's most significant post-earthquake architects. Davies and Phillips. Edmund Anscombe. Sidney Chaplin.
Most of them are painted the same colour. Grey. Sometimes a slightly different grey.
This is not a heritage problem. It's a perception problem. The bones are extraordinary. The surfaces are forgettable. And forgettable surfaces are what happens when building owners don't have a trusted pair of eyes helping them see what they already own.
"The bones are extraordinary. The surfaces are forgettable. And forgettable surfaces are what happens when nobody helps you see what you already own."
WestSide is at a moment. New businesses are arriving. WAMJam Sessions fill the laneway every Thursday in May. The Line gallery has put a global digital art network on the 300 block. The street is moving. The buildings can move with it... or they can stay grey.
Alan Passchier has been working with Hastings buildings long enough to know what they want to be. Colour palettes. Planning rules. The particular way a reeded horizontal band catches light at 4pm in autumn. He bends all of it in service of the building... and the city that has to look at the building every day.
His work is already on the street. The Kelly McNeil Building at 113 Queen Street — the 2021 Landmarks Trust Façade Enhancement Award winner — started with an Alan Passchier sketch. He drew the original colour scheme, the one that makes every detail of that facade earn its keep. The mural that followed was painted by Brandon Blair of Crimson Flower Ltd. The result was described by the building's owner as "a roaring success."
Alan doesn't homogenise. That's the thing you need to understand before you call him. He won't turn WestSide into a matching set. What he does is find the colour logic that already exists in each building and make it visible... so the street reads as a coherent place without every building looking like it came from the same tin. Coordination without sameness. That's the skill.
The vision for WestSide is exactly this. Not a themed precinct. Not a repaint-everything scheme. A building-by-building upgrade, each one finding its own voice, the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts. The strip earned its character across nine decades of independent decisions. The next chapter should be the same... just with better colour sense and a shared ambition.
There are eleven confirmed inscriptions on the upper facades of WestSide buildings right now... names and dates cast into the plasterwork by the people who built them. BLACKMORE'S. COMMERCE BUILDINGS. A F REDGRAVE & Co. Ltd. WADE BUILDING. F KING LTD. ESTAB. 1878. Most of them are the same colour as the wall behind them. Painted over. Invisible unless you're looking for them.
Reactivating a ghost letter is one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost things a building owner can do. A contrasting paint colour in a recessed panel. A slightly different tone on the lettering band. The name re-emerges from the wall. The building remembers what it was. The street gets a story back.
Westies published a full ghost letters survey in April 2026... eleven buildings, eleven inscriptions, and the stories behind each one. Some go back to 1878. Read it at hastingscbd.nz/history/westies-ghost-letters.html
The F King Ltd building is a good example of what's possible. The panel is already painted in teal... the lettering bold and legible. Someone at some point made the decision to make it visible. The result is one of the best-looking facades on the 300 block. It didn't require a rebuild or unnecessary I-beams. It required a decision.
F King Ltd · 314–318 Heretaunga Street West · The teal panel does the work
A facade upgrade is not just a coat of paint. Done properly, it starts with preparation... and preparation is where a lot of the real value is.
WestSide has seen excellent work from painters who understand this. The best jobs on the strip have gone beyond aesthetics into building health... stopping water ingress at parapets and window surrounds, repointing cracks, making sure the concrete beneath is sound before anything goes on top. A building that looks good and stays watertight for the next decade is worth far more than one that looks good for two summers.
If you want a recommendation for painters who have delivered excellent work on WestSide heritage buildings... preparation, not just paint, building health as well as aesthetics... Eric Wiig Painters have done exactly this on the strip. The kind of team that knows a parapet from a pilaster and treats the preparation as seriously as the colour.
That's 18 months away. Enough time to plan, fund, and complete a facade project... and enough time for more than one building on the strip to do it.
The Hastings Landmarks Trust Façade Enhancement Award recognises building owners and tenants who have upgraded the exterior of heritage buildings using appropriate colour schemes. It's part of a programme that has already upgraded over 100 buildings in the Hastings city centre. WestSide has the most concentrated collection of post-earthquake heritage architecture in Hastings... and the least representation in the award history. That's an anomaly worth correcting.
The Façade Enhancement Scheme is administered by the Hastings District Council and championed by the Landmarks Trust. If you own or occupy a recognised heritage building in Hastings, there is a chance the council will contribute toward your upgrade costs. Not a fortune... but enough to tip the decision. Talk to HDC or contact the Landmarks Trust to find out if your building qualifies. The scheme details are at hastingsdc.govt.nz/landmarks-trust
The 2021 winner was in Queen Street. The 2023 recipients included buildings in Karamu Road North. WestSide has the most concentrated collection of post-earthquake heritage architecture in Hastings... and the least representation in the award history. That's an anomaly worth correcting.
You own a building on WestSide. Or you lease one. Or you walk past one every day and you know exactly which one needs to wake up.
Here's the sequence.
"WestSide doesn't need permission from Auckland to be beautiful. It just needs someone to look at what's already there."
The street has the bones. The archive has the history. The Landmarks Trust has the award. Alan Passchier has the colour sense. The council might even chip in a few grand.
The only thing missing is the decision to start.