Passers by just can't go past Hawera's Purple Palace

Emerging from a dip and rounding a corner on State Highway Three, south of Hawera, we see the Purple Palace come into view.
It's where Jason WiNeera lives. He says his family's whanau home has been photographed hundreds of times since it was built in the late 1930s to early 1940s.
Mr WiNeera, the great-grandson of Te Kahui Pokai Atua, who built the house, says whanau members watch as motorists often stop, reverse, then stand in the middle of the road to take a picture.
Others would stand on the front lawn, while some foreign tourists would drive up to the door to ask if they could have a look inside.
One woman had knocked on the door, Mr WiNeera said, and asked permission to take a picture. "For over 50 years she had driven by with her husband but he told her not to be 'bloody nosey' when she asked him to stop. This day her husband was not with her and so she stopped."
On another occasion a young surfer had met his nephew and exclaimed, not realising the house belonged to his whanau: "That big purple place up there in Taranaki is really awesome."
The awesome Purple Palace has been home and a holiday house for the whanau over the years at the hearth of their grandmother, Pine Ngawharepounamu Pokai Atua, a generous woman with a big vegetable garden that she shared with everyone.
"This was the tikanga of the way we were brought up here. She was always helping people."
Mr WiNeera also recalled his grandmother saying the family would never be rich and famous.
However, there had been decades of rich memories for her whanau who had grown up there and who still returned, and the travellers who had photographed her home, which had become famous because the Purple Palace featured in two books on New Zealand houses.
In the beginning the palace had had an earthen floor and sacks covered the windows that had been recycled from Mokoia School.
Mr WiNeera said over the years different whanau members had worked progressively on the palace - a long drop had since been replaced by a flushing toilet and other modern amenities had been added, and the house had been rewired and plumbed.
But there is an optical illusion about the palace. While it may look big, it is long and narrow, and the exterior walls are, in fact, tin covering the original wooden boards. Three years ago, Mr WiNeera said, he and his uncle had painted the exterior, using 80 litres of purple paint. Purple had been a favourite colour of his grandmother, who used to have "heaps of cutlery and everything was tagged purple so she knew what belonged to her".
The Purple Palace holds many memories, and in the "Maori Room" at the northern end of the house are photographs of a proud and dignified whanau that stretch back generations; and pictures of the soldiers in the whanau who went to World War II and never returned.
It is a house that can cater for up to 50 people, where whanau return from overseas and sit in the kitchen and reminisce about the "good old days". Mr WiNeera said there were days when he couldn't get his renovating chores done because visitors kept calling in. And when they didn't a toot from a passing motorist acknowledged the Purple Palace was as much a landmark as Mt Taranaki.