Drop anchor on the shore of Ebb-Dunedin and explore the many delights of Ōtepoti, from fresh seafood and fashion to live music served up with locally crafted brews.
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You'll ind Ebb-Dunedin in a new building in a gentrifying part of Ōtepoti that was originally close to the harbour — here, Māori brought their waka up to the shore. It was to this history that Otherplaces, the owners of Ebb, looked to inspire a mural over the entire glass facade of the building.
There is a department store carpark out the front, and a block of old flats on the site behind, and retail either side. "It didn't have a lot going for it," says Gary Todd, of his first visit to the site. "So we turned it in on itself."
The building is essentially designed as two solid blocks of rooms around an open courtyard - it's sort of European in idea, though its thoroughly contempoarary in approach, using a modernist language of steel, glass and concrete. You enter at ground level into the heart of the building - receiption to one side and the excellend Ebb-Cafe to the other - and then come up through the middle.
Circulation is outside, looking down into the courtyard; at the end of each floor, there’s a communal sitting area. Where in most hotels corridors are purely places to move through from one part to the next, here they’re somewhere to linger – and that’s helped by the rotating collections of art on each floor.
The rooms are beautiful and unexpectedly soft, given the crisp modernist feel of the exterior. It’s gently luxurious, without being frou. There’s furniture from Simon James and mostly neutral tones, with splashes of colour and elegantly patterned carpet contrasting with dark steel elements and natural stone.
