Rebecca Lancashire finds an Art Deco and foodie haven on the east coast of the Shaky Isles.

Back in the '70s, New Zealand's Hawkes Bay region was the place to go for fresh fruit and Fantasyland, a quaintly daggy pool and playground complex with castle, moat and lilliputian village. This - and the reliably sunny weather - was reason enough to spend family holidays here.

As children we knew we had arrived when the golden-brown hills gave way to orchards and we saw the sign heralding the town of Hastings, "The Fruit Bowl of New Zealand", topped by a Carmen Miranda-style cornucopia.

A whole day would be set aside for Fantasyland, with its concrete Noddy Town and the Jetsons-style Tomorrowland. On the return journey, the station wagon would be packed with crates of plums, destined for bottling.

Making the same trip 30 years later, we can't find the fruit-bowl sign. Instead, we're entering "Wine Country". The pretty, rolling countryside is dotted with luxury retreats and architect-designed wineries offering alfresco lunches.

Artisan food producers are everywhere, making award-winning cheeses, olive oils, breads and preserves. And wine - the Hawkes Bay is one of the country's premium wine-growing regions; the gravelly soils producing highly regarded cabernet sauvignon and merlot at more than 30 vineyards, including Mission, Te Mata, Vidal and Church Road.

Napier's old-fashioned shopfronts, which we barely noticed 30 years ago, have been meticulously restored. There are palm trees and gelati-coloured plasterwork everywhere; Napier is recognised as one of the world's most complete Art Deco cities.

As we wander the streets we're constantly looking up at whimsical pastel-painted facades: sunbursts, zigzags, Mayan and Egyptian-inspired designs. There's the Gaity de Luxe Cinema and the wonderfully kitschy Soundshell on Marine Parade, its fountain lit up like a rainbow at night.

As children we knew about the Napier earthquake of 1931, the country's biggest, in which more than 200 people died and the town was almost completely destroyed. It gave our holiday a frisson of danger - would it happen again? Inevitably, someone would rock the bunks in the cabin in the middle of the night. But we paid no attention to the architecture that came afterwards.

Incredibly, within two years and at the height of the Depression, Napier was rebuilt, making it the world's newest and most modern city.

And it was rebuilt in the Art Deco style of the day. Napier's Art Deco Trust runs guided walks through the town and surrounding areas - the nearby city of Hastings also has many examples of the era - and there are antique and bric-a-brac shops to forage for vintage flapper dresses and feather boas.

You'll need one in February when everyone dresses up in period costume for the annual Art Deco Weekend, for tea dances, jazz, cocktail soirees and vintage cars. There's the Depression Dinner (good, plain '30s food), the Gatsby Picnic and the Soap Box Derby.

Inside the excellent local museum, it's a bit more sobering. New Zealand poet Lauris Edmond was a seven-year-old on the hot, still day in February when the quake hit.

She was in her school playground and turned around to find, in a matter of seconds, "the school was a red heap and a cloud of dust with the roof sitting on top. We were as dislocated as you could possibly be; everything had given up, everything had gone."

There are clippings from the newspapers of the day in glass cases. Recalls a witness in the Weekly News: "It all seems like a blurred cinematograph film of wrecked buildings, crying children, smoke, piles of bricks, bandaged heads, hurrying motor-cars, despair and isolation."

It's hard to imagine that Napier's beach didn't always look the way it does, but the quake raised the seabed by two metres. During the town's reconstruction, the area was filled in with rubble from collapsed buildings.

In a prime example of the locals' optimistic approach, verdant public gardens were planted on top. The steep beach is not considered safe for swimming but the hot pools of the stylish ocean spa complex overlook the sea.

The bay is still a bit of a secret, overlooked on the more conventional tourist route from Auckland to Wellington, via Rotorua and Taupo. Without children, the wineries, artisan produce and Art Deco architecture make for an indulgent few days.

With children, there are different but equally good attractions: the new national aquarium, the huge gannet nesting area at Cape Kidnappers (the largest mainland colony in the world) and the mecca of Fantasyland, now dragged into the 21st century as Splash Planet.

In the back seat on the way home, our children look slightly pink. SPF40 can't compete with a day on Splash Planet's water slides and river rides. Under their feet are several bottles of cabernet merlot, the exact colour of black doris plums.