The Titirangi
Village Piano.

He had a feeling the village needed something.

Titirangi is one of those places that already has a lot going for it — tall trees, a proper village market, a sense of community that most suburbs spend decades trying to manufacture. But Oliver kept saying it needed another layer, somewhere for music to just happen on any given afternoon without anyone having to organise it. Not a concert, not a venue, just something available when you walked past.

Free piano on Facebook Marketplace. We had a ute.

That's genuinely how it happened. Oliver found one listed for free on Facebook Marketplace, we had access to a ute, and the maths was pretty simple from there. We went and picked it up, loaded it on, drove it to the village and put it somewhere it would actually get played.

Nothing. Everything.

We didn't make an announcement or post about it — we just put it there and waited to see what happened. People started stopping when they walked past. Kids played it badly and brilliantly in equal measure. Someone sat down one afternoon and played long enough that people gathered around without quite realising they were gathering, and that was exactly the thing Oliver had been after all along.

The piano is still in the village and it's still being played. We take no credit for whatever music comes out of it — that belongs to whoever sits down.

Most things don't need to be complicated.

The piano project is probably the purest version of what Maui Studios actually is — you see a gap, you fill it with something good, and then you step back and let other people take it somewhere. We genuinely spent more time sourcing the ute than we did planning any of this, and that feels about right.