Our Toilets Are Famous: The Hundertwasser Loos of Kawakawa

I wrote this in 2016 or 2017 during the two years I lived in New Zealand. Some details — prices, hours, what’s open — may have changed, but the experience and my love for this place haven’t.

If you head about two and a half hours north of Auckland on Highway 1, you will likely be confused upon seeing a brown tourist sign that says “Hundertwasser Toilets” with an arrow pointing to the exit.

And if you’re like us, you’ll spend a few minutes in the car wondering why a town is advertising its toilets as a point of interest. And then, if you continue to be like us, you’ll take the exit anyway while Googling to see what’s up.

By the time we arrived in the small town of Kawakawa we knew that Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser was a renowned Austrian-born architect and artist who fell in love with New Zealand after visiting for an exhibition in 1973. He liked the place so much he bought a property in the Bay of Islands, eventually becoming a New Zealand citizen in 1983 — and even designed a proposed NZ flag featuring a bold green koru as a kind of thank you to the country. He lived near Kawakawa from 1975 until his death in 2000.

Hundertwasser had a thing for color, undulating floors, wavy walls, patterns, textures, recycled materials, sculptures, and nature. And in 1998, the local business association asked him to redesign the town’s tired 1960s public toilet block. The result opened in 1999 — his final piece of art completed in his lifetime.

The style is typical Hundertwasser: wavy lines, irregular ceramic tiles, integrated small sculptures, coloured glass, and a live tree growing up through the roof. Recycled bottles from the community and bricks from a former Bank of New Zealand branch are embedded throughout. It is a functional public bathroom — and also one of the few toilet blocks in the world considered an international work of art. Heritage New Zealand has since declared them a Category 1 historic place, ranking them alongside Christchurch Cathedral and Auckland’s War Memorial Museum. Around 250,000 visitors come every year specifically to see them.

When I wrote this post originally I noted that the toilets were his only New Zealand work. That’s no longer true — the Hundertwasser Art Centre in Whangārei opened in February 2022, based on a design he created for the city back in 1993 that the council declined at the time. It’s described as the last authentic Hundertwasser building in the world and houses 80 original Hundertwasser artworks alongside New Zealand’s only dedicated Māori art gallery. Now there’s a reason to stop in Whangārei too.

One more thing worth knowing about Kawakawa before you go: it’s the only town in New Zealand with a railway track running right through the centre of the main street Albom Adventures — a remnant of the coal mining days. So between the toilets and the train track, this little town punches well above its weight for a quick highway stop.

And just when I thought my toilet blog was done, I found an article in the newspaper about New Zealand’s best toilets! It’s called ‘Toilet Spotting Across New Zealand and the World’. I especially love the first one.