Ebb is a boutique hotel at 82 Filleul Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, built by a local family with property investor Otherplaces and running 28 rooms across six types plus its own restaurant, Ebb-Kitchen. The site sells room nights, restaurant tables and gift vouchers to travellers and Dunedin locals alike. It is built as a Nuxt front end rather than on a shop platform, with transactions handed to Nowbookit for rooms and tables and to VoucherCart for gifting.
Website Design
Two typefaces, held apart. Headlines use Droulers, a serif with strong contrast, while body copy and interface text use Unica77. The type scale is large and the line lengths short, so most pages read as a few sentences set against one photograph.
A palette taken from land and sea. The stylesheet defines a green scale from #595f43 through #a1a982 to a pale #ecece1, two tans at #f3f1ed and #f9f9f3, a navy at #060a1d and one burnt orange at #a65434. Backgrounds stay tan and the greens carry the accents.
Lower-case slugs used as headings. Each page is marked by a large hyphenated word in lower case, such as our-rooms, the-art-of-gifting and book-a-room-or-table, turning the URL fragment into the page’s visual anchor. Buttons are outlined pills and the newsletter is the only input on most pages.
Shopping Experience
A choice before the widget. The Book page offers “Book a room” and “Book a table” as two routes, and Gifting offers “Gift a stay” and “Gift a dining experience”, each prefaced with a scroll cue rather than an immediate form.
Booking is handed off, but styled. The room and table links pass the site’s own colour and font into the Nowbookit engine through the URL, so the external step keeps some visual continuity. Vouchers open in a separate VoucherCart storefront.
Room pages read like spec sheets. The Suite is broken into Guests, Room, Bathing, Entertainment, Refreshments, Dining and Car parking, listing two bedrooms across 120 square metres, underfloor heating, a local minibar and a 7 kW vehicle charger.
Brand Storytelling
The name is explained on the page. The story section states that Ebb is named for the site’s position on the edge of the now reclaimed Otago Harbour tidal flats, where on the ebb tide Polynesian travellers would first have landed.
Art carried onto the architecture. The same page credits Otepoti artist Simon Kaan with a large-scale work wrapping the full three-storey facade, depicting wakas arriving through the heads of the Otago Harbour.
Awards listed, not claimed. Instead of adjectives the page lists a 2021 Best Design Awards bronze, an ADNZ commendation, two 2022 New Zealand Institute of Architects awards and the Sir Miles Warren Award for Commercial Architecture.
Notable Features
A city guide inside the hotel site. The Almanac is presented as a pocket guide to Dunedin, with entries including “48 Hours in Dunedin”, “Fancy a drink”, “Fancy a bite” and notes from the architect and interior architect.
Two phone lines and a playlist. The footer separates hotel and cafe contacts on different numbers, maps the address and links a Spotify playlist alongside Instagram and Facebook. The promise sits above it: “Come as you are, go as you please.”
By Jibin Kumar
