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From issue: Autumn 2003

Blue Baths Back in the Swim

by Penelope Carroll

A husband-and-wife team has bought back to life an attraction that for 50 years was a scene of fun for decades of New Zealanders.

Once boarded up to keep vagrants out, Rotorua's Blue Baths have been meticulously restored. Picture: Ben Simmons

The original signs are still there: "You are requested to be sufficiently covered in a proper bathing costume." "Swimming Instruction: Fancy and Scientific Swimming".

But the "adult" pool at Rotorua's Blue Baths, where generations of swimmers and divers trained, is now a sunken lawn, dotted with daisies and buttercups. The diving boards have gone, pool ladders disappear into earth rather than limpid blue waters, and the cubicled changing rooms have metamorphosed into a museum. Gone too are most of the concrete tubs and old-fashioned wringers for rinsing dripping togs, apart from one left as a relic from the past. Where once swimmers and divers trained and competed in carnivals, patrons sip cocktails and eat canapes on the lawn, get married or picnic in the sun.

View of the Blue Baths 1935 Picture: Alexander Turnball Library*

However, the Blue Baths are still about swimming. The thermally heated "juvenile" pool in the courtyard beyond is still a popular family swimming venue, and 130 children attend weekly learn-to-swim classes there.

After half a century as Rotorua's most popular swimming venue, the Blue Baths, architectural gem of the lakeside Government Gardens, shut their doors to the public in May 1982, victims of high maintenance costs and insufficient patronage.

For 17 years, this striking double-storeyed art deco building, heavily influenced by Italian Renaissance and Spanish Mission architecture, deteriorated within while remaining outwardly stylish. Street kids, vandals and sulphur took their toll.

In 1992, the building was registered as a Category I historic place, and boarded up to keep vagrants out. From then, dated local builder and developer Mike Romanes' first involvement, repainting the outside and boarding up the inside. He became intrigued with the building.

"Generally, when people talk about heritage buildings, they talk about architecture and age," he said. "But the Blue Baths are also about people's relationships with the building. They talk about the fun they had there. It seemed I was the only person who hadn't swum there as a kid."

Bathers leaving the Blue Baths, 1938 Picture: Alexander Turnball Library*

His wife, Jo, was another. Neither of them grew up in Rotorua, but then nor did many of the thousands who swam at the Blue Baths (myself included) when visiting the "thermal wonderland".

"I found out from guys in their late 70s that, apart from swimming, a major attraction as children had been to sit on the lounge suite in the foyer," Mike Romanes said. "it made them feel important".

The Blue Baths building, with its Marseille-tiled roof, courtyards and sun balconies, open-air swimming pools and stylish tearooms, was built by relief workers during the Great Depression over five years. The juvenile pool opened first, in December 1931, and 200 eager bathers hit the water as soon as the opening ceremony ended. It was the first pool in the country where men and women could swim together.

Over the next 50 years, the Blue Baths became a New Zealand icon, a place to swim, to socialise, to take tea and to get married (sometimes two or three weddings on the same Saturday). Public outcry greeted the building's closure. Various deals to bring the baths back to life fell through, until Mike and Jo Romanes' proposal in 1998 to repair, restore and refurbish the Blue Baths in partnership with the Rotorua District Council, and run them as a place once again to swim, take tea and have lunch and as a venue for special celebrations.

The seven months of restoration work was relatively straightforward, Mike Romanes said. Concrete degraded by sulphur was repaired and the walls waterblasted, replastered and repainted. Exterior walls had originally been coloured with an oxide in plaster and subsequently repainted. Unblocking a small back entrance, he found an area that had never been painted over, so was able to match the exact colour for repainting the outside.

The many layers of paint - green, blue, yellow, red and white - were waterblasted from white plaster ceilings. Painted kauri doors, windows and facings were stripped. Hand-stripping the facings was probably the biggest part of the job, Romanes said. "There were many sore arms by the time we finished."

The adult pool, foundations gone, was lined to protect the Stourbridge tiles, then filled with earth and grassed over.

Total replumbing and rewiring was necessary. During the re-wiring, he unearthed a chair leg and part of the frame in the roof cavity. This was used as a pattern to make the chairs for The Tearoom. Old photographs taken at weddings have provided templates for light fittings, furnishings and other furniture.

The Rotorua Museum of Art and History played a major role, Romanes said. Staff organised a public appeal for information, photographs and mementoes, provided old bathing suits from the museum and tracked down people who had worked at the baths.

Jo Romanes assisted with the refurbishing, travelling to Napier, Auckland and Wellington in search of suitable light fittings and other "bits and pieces" from the 1930s. The whole building got under her skin, she said.

It was a full-on time for both the Romanes: "The kids [there are four] could tell you of all the meals of fish and chips they had down there, fighting with the seagulls and waiting for us to finish work," Mike Romanes said.

When the meticulously restored historic blue baths reopened on December 21, 1999 (68 years to the day since the first opening ceremony, Jo Romanes took over as manager of the pool and the tearooms. The museum is administered as part of the Rotorua Museum of Art and History.

She said the setting is wonderful to work in: "My favourite part is meeting so many old characters who spent a lot of their youth there, listening to their stories and seeing their pleasure in being back at the Blue Baths."

Penelope Carroll is a writer based in Auckland and the Coromandel.

* Photo: Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand / Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image