Moyola, Ranfurly

These leadlight windows are in the Moyola Guest House in Ranfurly, New Zealand.

According to their website, the house was built in 1931 by a family that had come from the Moyola Estate in Northern Ireland. I doubt the windows are original but they are very stylish.

Moyola is run by Edna McAtamney, the driving force behind Rural Art Deco in Ranfurly and David McAtamney who is described as a Farmer-Opera singer. No doubt they are interesting hosts.

A House in Ranfurly

The Napier suburb of Marewa probably offers the best collection of this style of modernist house in New Zealand but there are other isolated exampled elsewhere in the country.

On the South Island there is a modernist house in Kaikoura and this one in Ranfurly.

It is a very modest home and no doubt was easy and inexpensive to construct. But they still took the time and effort to add some decoration and even a little stepped-down kink in the roofline. I find it interesting that even the smaller of the two windows on the front of the house is divided into three sections.

Dental Centre, Ranfurly

On the South Island of New Zealand the town of Ranfurly has reinvented itself as a centre for rural Art Deco.

One of the later buildings on the Rural Art Deco Ranfurly Walk in the Dental Centre which was built in 1950 by Teddy Woods, the first dentist in the Ranfurly area.

This is a nice little building with a stepped roofline, very simple decoration consisting of two horizontal lines running in parallel around the facade and windows set back into the corner.

The entrance is set back from the footpath allowing for a (modern?) ramp to be incorporated without affecting the face of the building.

The porch has a nice feature of a stepped top to the entrance.

I think the signage is a bit Hollywood but they could be a lot worse.

Centennial Milk Bar, Ranfurly

Ranfurly, a town on the south island of New Zealand has reinvented itself in recent years as a centre for rural Art Deco.

It's best Art Deco building is the former Centennial Milk Bar and Refreshment Rooms which now houses a collection of Art Deco objects.

Like Napier, on the north island, Ranfurly hosts an Art Deco weekend each February which attracts so many visitors that the town population receives a 10-fold increase.

Ranfurly Auto, Ranfurly

I love the lines of this building in Ranfurly on New Zealand's South Island.

The sawtooth roof of the workshops on the left is mirrored somewhat with the stepped down roofline of the front office on the rounded corner of the building with the large segmented window.

A very handsome building and a great example of rural New Zealand deco.