HOTEL REVIEW: Too much style? Naumi Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand

• NEW ZEALAND: Introduction — Wellington, a ferry to Picton for a South Island holiday
• LOUNGE REVIEW: Update to Qantas First Lounge Sydney for Autumn 2025
• HOTEL REVIEW: Too much style? Naumi Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand

---

The booking process was pretty seamless. However, I did get an offer to upgrade our stay with various options, from room upgrade to early check-in or late check-out to included breakfast, wine on arrival, etc. These were generic options and not tailored to my booking. For example, Breakfast was one option when we actually had it included—for what it was worth (more about that later).

The options on offer result in a request to the hotel, which in our case was refused, given that breakfast was included in our rate.

Location & Arrival

Our flight didn’t arrive in Wellington until just before midnight, so by the time we had entered New Zealand and caught a cab into central Wellington, it was after midnight. Being in Cuba Street, Wellington’s entertainment section, this was not a problem. The hotel was busy, and the reception desk was well staffed.

There is only street parking at the entrance. Our cab double-parked briefly to drop us off.

We were checked in and on our way to our room efficiently.

History

The heritage building that houses the hotel was originally a Salvation Army Palace Hotel from the 19th century. It was transformed to its current configuration of 116 rooms across two hotel brands, opening late in 2020. The Naumi Hotel has 61 of those rooms across four categories.

Design

This is definitely a ‘more-is-more’ approach to design. The design was supervised by Material Creative an Auckland based New Zealand interior design company. They work across commercial and domestic projects, and have also designed the Naumi hotel at Auckland Airport.

Fittings in the rooms are predominantly custom-made by local and international makers. These include a New Zealand-based homewares and product design firm, Matt and Dan’s Made of Tomorrow mirrors. Bedside lights are by Swedish-based Ovature Studios.

Naumi also features the work of local artist Andi Regan, who created the sustainably designed kina (sea urchins) hand-crafted from cable ties.

The Room

Our booked Habitat Room is the hotel’s base-level room. At 34 square metres, it is a large, badly arranged room with what used to be a mini kitchen and a minute bathroom. Our room overlooked a side street and a modern office building.

We headed to the 5th floor from the lift in the corridor across the foyer from the reception area. These vertical stripes with the vertical recessed lighting were a bit strobelike, not for the light-triggered migraine prone.

The most striking thing on entering the room is the eye catching geometry, colour and stripes of the carpet. I suppose it echoes the stripes of the corridor.

Bedroom

After the carpet, the most outstanding thing is the wall of crushed velvet curtains behind the bold, oversized brown headboard. The bed is adorned with white linen, karated pillows, and a diamond-cut velvet bolster. The palette is almost too much, barely held together by the boisterous carpet.

The wall opposite the bed is dominated by a colour-reflecting glass wardrobe door and a lounge, coffee table, and stools. The wardrobe doors also conceal what used to be a mini but now decommissioned kitchen. Usable items are an empty minibar fridge, sink, and drainage board. A leather-clad box covers the old hotplates, and there is space where I presume there was a microwave, which is now removed.

This can be screened off, if you draw the wardrobe doors over. More on this in the minibar section below.

Moving around the room, let’s start with the desk/dining table and its two boldly upholstered bucket chairs.

With all this curtaining obscuring the walls, I bet you were going to ask: Where are the powerpoints? Cleverly concealed is the answer. Lets move around the room, letting the pictures tell the story.

Minibar

Let me start by saying that if there is one thing I hate, it’s something designed to do a particular thing, and when that function is no longer used, it is left unadapted. Here is a prime example of that proposition.

The hotel room once had a functioning stove top, and what I think was a microwave oven. For whatever reason, that service is no longer provided. The microwave or whatever has been removed, but the space for it is still obvious. The stove top, integrated into the sink top, also remains, together with its now non-functioning switches, dials and air vents.

It’s now covered by what is really a leather (pleather?) covered tray, upside-down over the stove elements. It now does duty to hold the kettle and tea selection. Please note that the actual minibar is empty. From some comments on review sites, it used to be full and complimentary.

Now, the coffee and tea selection was good, but why-oh-why not a coffee machine? It’s 2025, people! It’s not like there isn’t the space or power points.

Decomissioned hotplates and the removal of the microwave also mean that the sink is essentially useless. Another pet hate.

Wardrobe

The Wardrobe doors are a bit of a highlight of the room. They have an opalescent lustre with a pinkish hue. They were beautiful but useless as mirrors. Fortunately, there was a full-length mirror elsewhere in the room. The wardrobe doors could be drawn to conceal the kitchen and reveal the wardrobe.

The wardrobe had ample hanging space and, fortunately, standard coat hangers. Thank goodness, there were no theft-proof aberrations here. A laundry bag and list are always comforting.

A place to store your suitcases. Hurrah! Another bête noire for me is the lack of a space in hotel rooms to actually store your bags, which I think is a basic requirement of a good hotel room.

Having to store spare towels, hair dryer, and toilet roll in the wardrobe did not bode well for the bathroom facilities. Think storage and bench space.

The Bathroom

I won’t beat around the bush. This bathroom is small, and the shower cubicle is slightly weird. Because there is no room for one side of the glass shower cubicle to actually work as a door, they have gone for this weird double door arrangement at the corner of the shower. Now, it works better than it seems, but it is weird.

I am not a fan of the grey grouting, which just makes the bathroom and tiles look old and dirty.

I think this tissue dispenser, with the tissues coming out of the chimney like puffs of smoke, is possibly the cutest tissue dispenser I have ever seen. It sure beats those crocheted abominations that were prevalent in the 1950s in the bathrooms in certain suburbs.

The bathroom had a heated towel rail in one of the few signs of practicality over style. Practical for drying towels, but also for heating the bathroom.

The final disconcerting thing about the bathroom was the shower floor that was sloping in the wrong direction. It meant that it felt that the shower would flood into the rest of the bathroom at any moment. Not wanting this to happen, I never turned the shower up to full.

Amenities

I liked the Antipodes bathroom amenities. They were lightly scented, with a pleasant blackcurrant aroma. However, the connection between blackcurrants, a European food, and the Antipodes is hard to fathom. The link, gained from the brand’s website, is that these use ‘wild’ blackcurrants. The scents of eucalyptus and acacia are more normally associated with Australia and New Zealand.

The Antipodes website boasts that these wild blackcurrants offer antioxidant protection.

Public Areas – Pool & Gyms

We were not tempted to use the pool. This was winter, and neither of us had packed our swimmers. We didn’t use the gym either, but that was mainly to do with its minute size and lack of facilities. A gym in name only.

Public Areas – Restaurant and Bars

Let me say at the start that other than one breakfast, we did not patronise the Lola Rouge Restaurant and Bar. That’s largely because there are more interesting places to visit in Wellington and the nature of our breakfast experience, which you can read about below. You can look at the various menus of Lola Rouge here.

Breakfast

The meal that starts the day was a disaster. There was no apparent organisation of the staff in the dining room. Staff members whizzed about but with little efficiency. The breakfast concept was not explained. I should have paid more attention to the couple of damning comments I read on Tripadvisor about the breakfast.

The whole experience was horrible. It was almost impossible to order coffee or to attract any of the limited staff’s attention. It was entirely ungenerous. The food options were extremely limited and were not topped up. Hot food was restricted to scrambled eggs, steamed broccoli, mushrooms, and bacon, which was not cooked adequately.

There were only two types of fruit available: watermelon and some type of green-fleshed melon. There were also some limp cheese and salad leaves. I don’t know what that was about. Only one type of yoghurt was offered. The muesli was drenched in some kind of fruit juice in an ode to Bircher. Ugh!

The final offering was some very sad pastries and bread for toast.

Let’s just say that after that first morning, despite it being included in our rate, we went elsewhere for breakfast.

2PAXfly Takeout

This could be a very impressive hotel. The design, although not entirely to my taste, is stunning. Rooms are large and well furnished. The hotel is centrally located right on the main entertainment drag, Cuba Street. It lacks a view, which is unfortunate. This hotel masquerades as full-service and charges accordingly when it is meagre in its offering and hospitality.

The main issue is the pervasive lack of generosity. That starts with the lack of staff on everything from the reception desk to the breakfast restaurant. The rooms, besides being generous in size and design, are then ungenerous in their empty mini bar and non-functioning stove. Then there is the lack of a microwave that was once in the room. No coffee machine, robes nor slippers

It is very rare that I stay at a boutique property like the Naumi and then wish I had stayed at a more corporate, larger five-star venue because of the lack of service. Many people stay at boutique properties because they promise a higher level of more personalised service. That is not the case here at the Naumi Wellington, and that is a pity.

Would I stay here again? Yes, for the location, design, and room size. No, because of the lack of service, terrible breakfast, high tariff, lack of minibar, and overall negative hospitality.

Other Posts in the Series

<< LOUNGE REVIEW: Update to Qantas First Lounge Sydney for Autumn 2025