We stood on the road, some 50 metres and silent in the still, warm air as the pub burned; a quiet conflagration that defied the few hoses the volunteer brigade could bring to bear. The silence was as if we were at a wake, each of us bound up in our memories of days and nights in that big lounge bar, the one with the wall-sized photo of the Māori All Blacks and the three Going brothers in full flight — local heroes from just up the road. We reminisced in subdued voices, sharing stories of Hello Sailor and The Exponents in the big tent out the back and buying underpriced red wine from the little hatch that served as the bottle store, the staff more familiar with the correct pricing of Lion Red than the few dusty gems on the shelves behind them.

And so it went. The roof rafters collapsed in a spray of sparks and our talk turned to other fires to which we had each borne witness: the pre-dawn loss of the Akaroa fish and chip shop, the Victoria Park grandstand and the explosive loss of houses on a parched-dry Redcliffs knoll, a day so hot the Wigram fire engine got stuck in the melting road tar of Canal Reserve.

Driving back over the hill, we discussed what might happen with the new tabula rasa at the water’s edge, a site having a long association with American novelist and deep-sea fisherman Zane Grey. With his characteristic mix of bravado and vision, Leigh proposed buying the still-smouldering ruins and rebuilding, citing the bay’s attraction as a gateway to the offshore island reserve with its burgeoning dive tourism. For all our holiday enthusiasm, we ran out of steam when we returned to the city, the complexity of the ash pile’s ownership and insurance becoming more apparent, and the appeal of a somewhat remote development by three neophyte would-be developers fading.

Visiting the bay now one experiences all the uncertainty of our building on the water’s edge, and the lost opportunities that result. The natural curve of a sandy bay, memorably ringed with a picket of swordfish bills in one of the pub’s photos from the halcyon Zane Grey days before catch and release, has been lost to the infrastructure of mooring, storing, launching and retrieving boats.

The bay is dominated by a rather large and ungainly phoenix on the old hotel site, awkwardly adrift between the flat land stretching inland up the valley and the uninviting rock-retained water’s edge a hundred metres away. It is a big presence in the arc of the bay: four storeys high, 130 metres long of multicoloured and gabled bays, a retail strip at ground level on the seaward side, and a small supermarket, gas station and hotel entry in the rear. Apparently, the local council refused consent for the behemoth, thinking it too big, but revised its view under duress from the local community who saw it offering jobs and tourist infrastructure for the growing numbers of fishing, sailing and diving visitors.

The building offends many for whom buildings matter, thought too chaotically coloured, too-crude an assemblage of foreign and disparate forms, and just too damn big. And it is all of those things, and in doing so sits well outside the expected outcome of the RMA-based consent system. Perhaps its existence is affirmation of the power of community approval, or has the provision of the retail ‘active edge’ at ground level played into the planners’ inevitable expectations? Perhaps the bars of intense colour used in a plucky attempt to break up the massive form have been overlooked. We are so used to arguing the toss over what shade of olive drab or dull brown best renders one’s building a shapeless blob amid the local flora that this thing is a shocking presence, as if one of the more flamboyant denizens of K’ Road were strutting their stuff in Remuera village.

Frankly, I like its chutzpah. I like the way it creates a massive built presence that holds the space of the bay from oozing up the valley behind, and I enjoy the strip of retail promenade that has just enough length to accommodate a mix of shops. It’s not a great building, though; the precast construction all but defies an inviting fitout and a sort of low-maintenance, hoseable aesthetic prevails. The lack of contact with either the bay hinterland, the road in front or the distant water edge is its real shortcoming, betraying the uncomfortable spatial relationships that result from an accretion of discrete decisions by councils and landowners, both constrained by district plan and land title.

What might have been a great hotel, curving around the bay with a narrow promenade full of diners and drinkers overlooking the water is lost. The hapless hotel guest in search of the ocean has an ugly traverse through an ungracious roadside strip with desultory exotic palms and a few attempts to balance shelter from the sea breeze while maintaining an outlook to, well, a road, a car park, a hundred metres of grass and the clattering masts of the marina beyond. The scale of the lawn is enormous, suggesting some ‘horse trading’ at the time of the marina’s consent: 10,000 square metres of turf for a beach.

Though I am not a boatie, I accept that there are probably enough swimming places along the ribbon of pōhutukawa-clad headlands and sandy coves up the road for the beach in the old hotel photographs to be sacrificed, but might a more inspired council and landowner have connived to manipulate title and district plan to make a space determined more by the delight of occupying the water line with a wine or coffee and the smell of salt in the air, than the dull inevitability of esplanade reserves, road setbacks and the immutability of legal title?

If the big bruiser in the middle of the bay is a lost opportunity, a couple of hundred yards or so to the east, a café sits nestled into a fold in the hill where the road curves to the south. It has only the road between wine glass and water, albeit water occupied by the to and fro of loading dive boats with gas bottles and neoprene-clad passengers. The building is an eclectic assembly of recycled timber posts and beams, crude stonework, thatched roofs and walls, and plastic blinds.If that all sounds a bit rough and tumble, it is proof that the sum of a building may, under inspired direction, transcend a listing of its components.

I am pretty sure that then local artist Tom Burnett designed and built this place, drawing on his disdain for the strictures of city hall. His intuitive sense of the way in which the romance of a castaway experience might be conjured up if the constraints of a too prescriptive bureaucratic apparatus are challenged is evident in every one of its unlikely junctions. The joint does a good trade. No doubt, fresh fish, a good wine list and a decent cup of coffee are critical but, so too, is that happy conjunction of hill slope, proximity to the water’s edge and that wonderful confection of materials that seem pulled together from the detritus of the high-water line.

Between the behemoth in the middle and the bijoux at the edge are two ways of building in the bay. Neither is perfect but each offers a comment on our way of building in sensitive landscapes. The former is an enormous form that needed, but failed to get, the cooperation of city hall to organise the bay’s public and private spaces and create that rare thing in Aotearoa, the intensely occupied water’s edge. In contrast, that little café in the corner of the bay shows us the delight possible when city hall keeps its head down.