We walked past The Print Room on Vogel Street for months before we worked up the nerve to buzz the intercom. From the pavement, there’s nothing to see – a roller door, a street number, and the faint smell of ink if the wind’s right. Behind it, someone is setting type by hand in a warehouse studio that’s been quietly producing some of the most considered printed work in Dunedin.
The Kind of Place You Have to Buzz to Enter
Behind the Roller Door
You notice the ink before anything else. It hits somewhere between the doorway and the concrete floor – a mineral, chemical sharpness that lets you know this is a place where things get made, not displayed. The Print Room sits behind a roller door on Vogel Street, the kind of entrance that gives nothing away from the pavement. No shopfront, no sandwich board. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d walk straight past.
Inside, the space opens up the way old warehouses do – high ceilings, raw walls, natural light falling across workbenches. There are presses. Proper ones, cast iron and steel, the sort that weigh more than a car and do one thing exceptionally well. Trays of metal type sit in cases along one wall, each letter reversed and waiting. Paper stock is stacked in neat piles. Rollers, brayers, ink tins, drying racks – the tools of a trade that predates every screen you own. It’s not a museum. Everything here gets used.
Who Runs It and Why They Stayed
The studio is run by a printmaker and designer who came to Dunedin through the art school – the same pipeline that has fed the city’s creative community for decades. Otago Polytechnic‘s design programme has a habit of producing people who arrive for three years and never quite leave. The Print Room is what happens when one of them decides the leaving part isn’t worth the trouble.
The choice to set up on Vogel Street wasn’t accidental. You could run a design studio from a bedroom or a co-working space, but letterpress needs room. It needs heavy machinery, ventilation, storage for a ridiculous quantity of type. The old warehouses on Vogel Street offered all of that at a rent that wouldn’t bankrupt a sole trader in a specialist field. Dunedin’s commercial property market, for all its frustrations, has one genuine advantage for creative businesses: it hasn’t priced out the people who make things.
Not a Gallery, Not a Shop
If you tried to categorise The Print Room, you’d run into trouble almost immediately. It’s a working studio first – the place where jobs get designed, set, inked, and pulled. But it also functions as a collaborative space, hosting other printmakers and designers who need access to equipment most people can’t keep in their spare room. Occasionally it opens for exhibitions or sales, and there are prints you can buy, but retail is a byproduct of the making, not the point of it.
This distinction matters more than it might seem. A gallery exists to display finished work. A shop exists to sell it. The Print Room exists to produce it, and everything else flows from that. The workspace isn’t arranged for visitors – it’s arranged for work. When you do visit, you’re stepping into someone’s practice, not their storefront. That’s what makes it interesting.
Ink on Paper, Hands on Machines
What Letterpress Actually Means in 2024
Letterpress is relief printing at its most elemental. You set individual letters – metal, wood, sometimes polymer – into a form, lock them tight, roll ink across the raised surface, and press paper against it. What lifts off the bed is a mirror image of what you put down, every letter carrying a faint impression where type met stock. You can feel it with your fingernail.
It is slow work. Setting type by hand for a single poster can take hours. A digital designer could achieve a visually similar result in twenty minutes, which is precisely the point – letterpress isn’t trying to compete with digital on speed. It offers something screens can’t replicate: depth. The ink sits on the paper differently. The impression, that physical bite, is unique to each pull. There’s no undo button, no dragging layers around. You commit to the form, ink it, print it, and live with what comes out. Calling it a dying craft misses what’s actually happening. It’s a living one, practised by people who’ve chosen it knowing full well what the alternatives are.
The Jobs That Come Through the Door
The range is wider than you’d expect from a specialist studio. Wedding invitations account for a decent chunk of the work – couples who want something with weight and texture rather than a PDF attachment. Business cards, too, for people who understand that handing someone a letterpress card says something about how you approach your own work. Then there are the art prints, the limited editions, the collaborative projects with illustrators and writers who bring an image or a text and want it made into something physical.
One of the more interesting recent lines has been working with local breweries and wineries on labels and promotional material – the kind of thing where the tactile quality of letterpress maps directly onto the product’s own identity. A craft brewery handing out a letterpress coaster at a tasting event is making a coherent statement. It’s not the biggest revenue stream, but it’s the kind of job where the studio’s skills and the client’s needs genuinely align, and that keeps the work interesting.
Part of the Street, Not Just on It
The Vogel Street Effect
Vogel Street has a particular quality that’s hard to engineer: a density of people who make things, packed into a few hundred metres of converted warehouses. The Print Room sits among ceramicists, graphic designers, photographers, and furniture makers. Shared walls breed shared projects. A printmaker and a potter collaborate on packaging. A designer down the corridor sends a client upstairs for business cards. The exchange isn’t formal – nobody signed a partnership agreement – but it’s real, and it produces work that wouldn’t exist if everyone were scattered across the city in separate studios.
There’s a practical side to it too. Equipment gets shared. Knowledge gets passed around over coffee at the places that have sprung up between the studios. Problems that would stump one maker get solved by another who’s faced the same thing in a different medium. The precinct functions as an informal guild, though nobody would use that word. It’s just what happens when you put enough creative people on the same block and leave them to it.
When the Doors Open
For most of the year, The Print Room’s roller door stays down. The work happens behind it, and unless you’ve got a reason to buzz in – a job to collect, a project to discuss – you’re on the outside looking at corrugated steel. The exceptions matter.
During the Vogel Street Party, the precinct’s annual open-studio event, the doors roll up and the public walks in. People who’ve passed the building a hundred times on their way to a cafe suddenly find themselves standing next to a press that’s been there for years, watching ink meet paper for the first time.
These open events do something you can’t achieve with a website or an Instagram feed. They let people experience the noise, the mess, the patience of the work. A visitor watching type being set letter by letter, slowly, with tweezers – that’s worth more than any amount of polished marketing. It builds the kind of understanding that turns a curious passerby into someone who commissions a print for their wall or sends a friend for wedding stationery. The relationship starts with proximity.
The Precinct Without a Masterplan
Nobody sat down and decided Vogel Street should become a creative precinct. There was no council strategy paper, no developer’s concept render, no branding consultant hired to name it. What happened was simpler and, in some ways, more Dunedin: the buildings were cheap, the spaces were big, and creative people needed somewhere affordable with room for the kind of work that doesn’t fit in a modern office.
The Print Room is part of that pattern. It exists on Vogel Street because the economics of old warehouse space and a niche craft aligned at the right moment. But there’s a fragility to that model. Earthquake strengthening requirements, rising insurance premiums, and the possibility of developers seeing the precinct’s character as a selling point rather than something to preserve – any of these could change the equation. The precinct’s strength is its organic, unplanned nature. Its vulnerability is exactly the same thing.
Making a Living by Making Things
The Economics of Craft in a Small City
Running a specialist print studio in a city of 130,000 is not a path anyone takes for the money. The market is small. There’s no deep bench of corporate clients commissioning large print runs, no advertising agencies sending over weekly jobs. What Dunedin does offer is room to operate. The rent on a Vogel Street warehouse is a fraction of what an equivalent space costs in Auckland or Wellington. That lower overhead is the difference between a studio that can take on interesting, lower-paying work and one that has to chase volume to survive.
The hustle is constant, though. Every letterpress studio is a small business first, and small businesses in small cities survive on reputation, relationships, and the willingness to take on jobs that aren’t glamorous alongside the ones that are. Printing a community group’s event posters pays the same power bill as printing a limited-edition art series. The trick is doing both without letting either define you.
What Stays When Everything Goes Digital
There’s a question that hangs over every craft practice in the digital age, and it’s tempting to answer it with sentiment. But The Print Room’s case for existence isn’t sentimental. It’s material. A letterpress print has a physical presence that a digital file doesn’t – you can feel the impression, see how the ink pools slightly at the edge of a letter, notice the variation between one pull and the next. These aren’t imperfections to be corrected. They’re proof that a person stood at a press and made this specific thing.
That matters more now than it did twenty years ago, not less. In a world saturated with identical digital output, the handmade carries a different kind of value. People seek it out – for wedding invitations, for art on their walls, for business cards that feel like they were made by someone who cared. The Print Room isn’t fighting a rearguard action against the digital world. It’s offering something the digital world can’t, and as long as people can tell the difference between something printed and something produced, studios like this will have a reason to keep the presses running.
The roller door will be down next time you walk past. The presses will be running, or the type will be getting set, or someone will be pulling a proof and checking the impression with their fingernail. You won’t see any of it from the street. But it’s worth knowing it’s there – a small studio doing physical work in a city that still has room for people who’d rather make something than design it on a screen.