At the corner of High and Shortland Streets in Auckland's CBD, a cream-painted Edwardian commercial building from 1925 carries a neon sign with the easy confidence of a property that has never needed to shout. Hotel DeBrett was restored and reimagined in 2010 by New Zealand interior designer Alison Connor, who treated the 25-room property less as a heritage exercise and more as a chance to build something with genuine character — the kind of accumulated, slightly eccentric personality that older European hotels develop over decades rather than through a single design intervention. Connor's palette runs deliberately warm and mismatched: boldly striped wool rugs in red, ochre, teal, and cream anchor guestrooms furnished with mirrored side tables and Eames-adjacent white moulded chairs, while custom bed runners printed with botanical and typographic imagery give each room a distinct graphic quality. The atrium restaurant, glazed at its upper register and lined with exposed brick, fills with a loose arrangement of velvet armchairs in burgundy, slate, and tangerine gathered around brass-edged tables — a copper-topped service counter anchoring one end. The bar is the building's most considered room: dark timber panelling, a long brass-railed counter, and a sage-painted coffered ceiling with globe pendants that carry the atmosphere of a colonial-era gentlemen's club updated with a lighter editorial hand. Across every space, the effect is closer to a well-loved private members' club than a designed hotel.

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