Catching a wave in Australia

Crown Perth features a casino, high-end retail, two luxury hotels and more. Photos by David Parker/The New York Times

Easy, breezy Perth growing with style into funky, eco-fabulous hipster mecca, Baz Dreisinger discovers. Baz Dreisinger Conjure up a city embodying all things right about cities.

Assuming you lean toward the progressive, I'll wager your rendering includes the following: multiple parks and waterfronts; spotless subways and free public buses; restaurant menus with organic, locally sourced food and wine; cool bars in heritage buildings; and pop-up everything, from farmers' markets to cinema and yoga.

Welcome to Perth.

The capital of Western Australia, where some 1.8 million of the state's 2 million residents live, left this New Yorker mesmerized: Could a city really be so easy, breezy, green and pristine－so positively livable? I'd thought Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York, was hipster heaven, but it pales beside Perth.

In truth, such a conjuring of the city has, in the past seven years or so, become a reality. Since the 1880s, when Western Australia's gold rushes began, Perth has had a boom-and-bust economy. But the past decade was mostly boom, with an emphasis on natural resources like uranium, iron, zinc and natural gas. Perth's style of growth, though, eschews big-and-bling for eco-fabulous－the anti-Dubai.

Still, cranes are a fixture of the skyline as grand, thoughtful urban developments keep on coming. A state investment program pours millions into new infrastructure and big projects, including a 15,500-seat futuristic arena that opened in 2012 and a $750 million airport terminal now in the works. Australians once joked that "WA" stood not for "Western Australia", but for "wait awhile"－a jab at the laid-back West-coast lifestyle, not as up-to-the-minute as Melbourne or Sydney－but that now has a new connotation: If you think Perth is getting trendy, wait till you see what it's becoming.