The bus glided along the expressway around Auckland and turned north onto two-lane Route One. For miles there were evergreens and tall fern trees and towns like Whangaparaoa and Orewa. Then, just past Whangarei, the road began to bend and swoop like an airborne snake (although none reside in New Zealand), and every bend revealed a bay, the water, even in the late New Zealand autumn, like an aquarellist's tray of greens and blues, and among them were daubs of white croutons, islands that glittered under a sun that still glowed bright.

This was the Bay of Islands country, and I was headed for the washrooms. In this far-northern extreme of the North Island of New Zealand were enough outdoor attractions to satisfy thousands of readers of "adventure" lifestyle magazines for all eternity: trekking, boating, skiing, snorkelling, diving, and the like, but to me, if not to others, including tourism officers, the northland meant the old mining town of Kawakawa and the washrooms designed and built by the Viennese-born artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

Hundertwasser made a name for himself in Europe with colourful paintings that eschewed the straight line and were deceptively simple. Many of them were based on the mazes that were his talismans. The painter himself could not be pinned down; he eluded the art establishment and the avant-garde. He always physically eluded capture, travelling the world, establishing studios in several countries, routinely sailing his own ship between Venice and Polynesia. He discovered New Zealand in the '70s and bought a chicken shack in the rain forest. He converted the shack into a bottle house and became a citizen of a land that appealed to him for its beauty and whimsicality.

But still he travelled and, back in Austria, after a decade of fighting with city and federal governments, got approval for his plan to build an apartment block. The result, the residential Hundertwasser House, is a multicoloured maculation on the staid urban landscape of Vienna. At least, it was a maculation, as neighbours have come to paint their places and grow trees on their roofs and out their windows, in homage to the artist and his ideas.

So successful was this building that there were calls for more Hundertwassers, and the artist subsequently had buildings put up throughout the world, probably the most dramatic being his incinerator and heating plant in Vienna, an ultramarine tower with gilded enamel rings and domes lit by fibre optics.

Hundertwasser also did stamps and licence plates and phone cards. He proposed a stamp and a flag for New Zealand, but they turned him down. He made a model for a building in Wellington to house a museum and symbolize the relationship between Maori and pakeha, but that was also rejected. Then he was invited to do a project in a place called Kawakawa, a dying town that was once a centre of dairy processing and coal mining. I was there in the early '90s, pre-toilets, and the coal dust had been replaced by the gloom of failure. Now, post- toilets, Kawakawa has come to life again.

In building the toilet block, Hundertwasser used local labour and scrounged materials. Unemployed workers salvaged wine bottles for the windows and bricks from abandoned buildings for the structure onto which were affixed tiles made by local schoolchildren. The result is about the most cheerful place you'd want to do your business.

The toilet block was the last project Hundertwasser completed before his death in 2000, at the age of 71. The building received an architectural award, and the prize money was used to construct an arch at the entrance to Kawakawa, done by others in the Hundertwasser style.

The toilet block has changed Kawakawa, as his municipal building changed its neighbourhood in Vienna. Although not well known among tourism people, Kawakawa is on the international itinerary of people desiring to see obscure art and architecture. In a shop across the street from the toilet block, I met people from Italy and Canada. Other businesses have mosaicked the faí§ades of their buildings. Classes from a grade school in nearby Paihia visited the toilets and were so enthused that their teachers were able to finagle the powers that be for the wherewithal so that the kids might do something along the Hundertwasser line. They did it, and their miniature play buildings look great. The master would have applauded and joined in the games.

Hundertwasser did a unique thing. Besides producing hundreds of marvellous paintings, he sprinkled the world with dollops of colour and imagination that one can literally step into and inhabit. That would make an itinerary of its own: visiting every Hundertwasser building in the world. With 36 structures completed before his death and more being built from his plans, the journey would take a while but be well worth it. I think I'll do it. -