The drive alongside the harbour as you head into Napier and look across to Ahuriri presents a hillside enclave, with an almost painterly quality, overlooking the usual plethora of port structures, cranes, shipping containers, industrial warehouses and moored ships. For the past 12 months, I’ve been watching the silhouette of a four-level, white, sawtooth-roofed building emerge. At a couple of kilometres across the water, it appears big, or maybe not; it’s hard to judge at that distance. I made a mental note: must explore at some stage. My chance to do so came when I was asked to write a review of RTA Studio’s Customs Quay Ahuriri, which is also a descriptor of its location.

It’s a bleak, wet morning with unseasonal chill as I wait to meet RTA directors Rich Naish and Ben Hayes, and associate director David Wright. Thankfully, there is a coffee shop on the ground level with heaters and a small gathering of locals who have already claimed their new local. Wright, from RTA’s Havelock North studio, greets me first and dives into a lesson on the geography and history of the area. “The parcel of land we stand on now was once a gravel island in the harbour. The land surrounding was displaced during the 1931 earthquake and the island joined back up to the mainland.” I’m promptly reminded of the shaky ground on which we stand. More on that later.

Customs Quay Ahuriri is a true mixed-use development with office, hospitality, retail and accommodation all situated on the site. The raising of the ground floor is a partial response to the basement car park needing to stay above the high-tide water line and creates a layered edge from street, footpath, seats and planters to the elevated hospitality decks. Reclaimed chunky timber posts assert a wharf edge to the northerly deck with a large, protruding canopy. A new modern Asian fusion eatery, Madame Social, has occupied the prime corner space. I’m told it’s very good.

The development is two separate buildings: a three-level office building and a four-level, mixed-use main building. The ground floor of the main building is neatly divided into four sectors with a north-south and a west-east axis. The architects have called them laneways, and they serve to encourage public engagement with the various retail, hospitality and offices located on the ground floor. Naish mentions a consideration for future developments that could take place on adjoining sites surrounding this development and his hope that adjoining developments could extend this porosity and encourage a public connectedness. I can visualise more of the same and a real portside village vibrancy. I’m also hoping it’s not the back walls of big-box retail stores. Planners, please take note.

While the development is a little taller than are the surrounding portside structures, the building at street level does not feel out of scale or overbearing. The Resource Consent to extend through the height restriction was worth the effort — a lesser scale on this corner could have been underwhelming. The western elevation adjoining the port warehouses adopts a similar sawtooth roof form and is linked in its response to the local context. The articulation of the façades is gentle and considered, emphasising a verticality, deck voids, protruding balconies, and pushing and pulling of masses to appear as many smaller buildings conjoined. The use of a white-coloured, vertical metal cladding accompanied by the black pressed-steel window spandrels, balconies and canopies acknowledges the area’s maritime and industrial past.

Onto the apartments and a meeting with the penthouse apartment-owner David Mackersey, who also happens to be the developer and the constructor, and is very familiar with the Ahuriri portside suburb. He previously lived in one of his developments across the road and, from his new prime corner penthouse apartment, he points out his other developments from the past 20 years. They are significant and I instantly recognise that he has been the lead catalyst for change in the Ahuriri area. “I developed that hotel, and created that theatre, that apartment building, that office building, that retail building,” he says. Impressive. I have the distinct feeling he has had this vision for his own portside village, and his retirement dream penthouse, for 20 years.

Mackersey is quick to say he didn’t want small, pokey apartments, instead staunchly opting for larger apartments, 180m² to 300m², and pushing the values for apartment living in Hawke’s Bay to record levels. This is not your usual approach from a developer, who typically has a penchant to wring the neck of profitability. I admire this sort of bravery: to pioneer and shape a desired outcome rather than succumb to mass consensus. The apartments are neatly arranged around the laneway axis from the ground floors, extruded vertically, offering wide hallways and long views out to sea or land. Small lounges on each floor, with artworks commissioned for the project adorning the walls, feel more like they’re in a luxury hotel than in your usual apartment corridor. A communal social area for residents is located on the top floor with a retractable roof. The space is complemented with comfortable furniture, a BBQ, a spa pool and a sauna.

The apartments are well appointed and spacious, with tasteful kitchens and bathrooms. They are, maybe, a little bland for my liking, with white-painted everything, but I also recognise a blank canvas for new owners to “make it their own”. The steel structure is chunky, and the architects have decided to pull this inside the wall lines and express. Huge columns and K braces, splice plates, and nuts and bolts in black cross the walls. There is something reassuring about the expression of structural elements and I remember the early conversation with Wright about the project’s location in a high seismic zone. The black steel offers a nice juxtaposition against the perfectness of the white walls.

Customs Quay Ahuriri is a quietly reassuring development. It is a very polite new neighbour that has just fitted in. It is not bold, it is not brash and it is not asserting itself into the neighbourhood. All these observations are not written from a negative perspective but from a point of praise for the developer and the architects. The lesson here is that there is real skill and merit in designing a building that just fits. It could have easily been the generic horizontal, wide-deck-aesthetic apartment block response, as I see elsewhere all over the country, but I am so relieved it isn’t. My next visit is to try out Madame Social and I will be sure to lift a quiet glass of Hawke’s Bay’s finest to say cheers to the architects and developer on a job well done.