The Logan Park Motor Hotel was designed by architect Ron Sang: one of his first jobs following his graduation from the University of Auckland’s Architecture programme. While working with the firm Lewis Walker & Co Ltd., Sang was approached by Auckland Chinese businessman Arthur Lowe about a project to build a large hotel. This resulting project took eleven months to build, culminating in a grand opening in October 1966 with an extravagant buffet to match.

This lush hotel boasted 128 bedrooms, a coffee shop, conference room, two à la carte restaurants, banquet reception room, and breakfast bar opening to a landscaped outdoor area and surrounding gardens designed by Ted Smyth that featured a heated pool with underwater music.

The hotel was to become a hugely popular social venue. As Nina Finigan explains, “When it opened, Logan Park was at the forefront of a new kind of dining experience. Both the dining room and bar exuded sophistication: plush red velvet curtains; lamps on every table emanating a soft, boudoir-type crimson glow, pink anodised aluminium modernist chandeliers protruding from the ceiling and waistcoated staff all indicated that you were in for a classy night out.”

Logan Park was one of the early restaurants to offer dinner and a show and—with the easing of alcohol restrictions in New Zealand—beer, wine and cocktails were available with meals. The hotel represented a new concept in New Zealand entertainment, with nightly dancing, a floor show (entertainment presented on the floor rather than the stage), and a live ‘resident’ band six nights a week. In 1967 this was The Tikiwis – a showband featuring Winiata Watene, Paul Watene, Philip Rivers, David Rivers and the Australian singer Helene Johnston.

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Allen’s mural was commissioned specifically for the hotel. Created from laminated pine panels with countersunk steel sheets, the work wrapped around three sides of a service block in the entrance of the building, behind the main reception desk.

In an early proposal, Allen described an inspiring theme for the mural being that of "movement pattern", elaborating that "the designs describe in diagrammatic form the pattern of movement taking place within this space. The rhythmic curves are intended to complement the grace of movement. The vertical and solid shapes correspond to points of rest and stationary figures. The walls are primarily seen as an appropriate background and to become enough of a feature to stimulate the eye without domination." (Fine Arts Special Collections, University of Auckland)

In discussing the creative process behind the work, Allen recalled “my head wouldn’t let me get past thinking of a wheel theme, so I thought for materials I would use a heavy 80mm-thick laminated pine panel and counter-sink steel elements, reminiscent of wheel shapes, into it. When the panels came back from the fabricators I felt they were far too pristine, so I attached a couple of heavy screw-eyes to the ends and towed them, face down, behind my car round the grounds of Elam until I had achieved a surface texture to my liking.

“I then drew on the surface of the board the shapes of the sheet metal I was going to embed, and enlarged the drawing a little bit so that the metal had a bit of space about it, and then cut the wood away to a depth of 40mm with a router. Next I cut the metal shapes out of 4mm steel plate and attached the fixing bolts to the back.” (The Skin of Years, p.81).

The final piece was assembled with the assistance of Warren Viscoe and Terry Powell (recent graduates from the Elam School of Arts, where Allen was teaching at the time), and was installed in 1967. According to one reporter it was, at the time, “The largest commissioned work of art in the city”. Allen remarked that he “wondered about the receptionists with all this weighty stuff behind them day after day.”

Some years later, while Allen was living and working at the Sydney College of Arts, Greer Twiss contacted him with the news that the Logan Park Hotel was being demolished. Despite efforts to relocate it, a suitable home could not be found so it was destroyed.

The Logan Park Motor Hotel was later to become the Kingsgate Hotel, Greenlane. The hotel was closed by Jan 2008, and the buildings were demolished in 2015.

Thanks Sophia Toop for assisting with this listing.

See also:

• Phil Dadson & Tony Green, The Skin of Years (Clouds, Michael Lett: 2014)

• Art News: Hamish Keith, ‘Welcome signs of recognition’ (Auckland Star, 13 September 1966)

• Logan Park Motor Hotel mural, Auckland., 1966 (Jim Allen papers (MSS-Archives-FA 2013/09), Fine Arts Special Collections, University of Auckland)

• What ever happened to dinner and a show? | The Spinoff

• Old Auckland: Logan Park Motor Hotel (Facebook post: 28 Nov 2017)