Architecture by Group 70 International Text by Joshua Tompkins Photography by Laurie Black WHEN PEOPLE BUY THEIR FIRST HOME, THEY OFTEN DECORATE it themselves; it could even be a fixer-upper requiring extensive repairs. Later, if purchasing a vacation home, they will perhaps work with an interior designer to ease the burden the second time around. After that, those with the means to add a third or fourth house to their collection might simply shop for a spec home that’s finished right down to the napkin rings – the furniture, the art, everything. Imagine making your first trip to your brand-new villa, where you favorite shows are already TiVoed and the fridge is piled with Panini. Behind the gates of Maluhia at Wailea, a 14-home planned community on the South Maui coast, such completeness is the norm. Maluhia homes have names: House No. 4 is Hale Ola, which translates as “house of life.” Like many Maluhia residences, Hale Ola, a 6,000-square foot contemporary Hawaiian estate on the hill overlooking Mokapu Beach, was built on spec and even decorated around a fictitious buyer, a music lover who travels extensively. Various musical instruments are found amidst the antique and custom furnishings and contemporary Chinese art, and a black studio grand piano stands formally at center stage between the living and dining areas. Maluhia at Wailea, which broke ground in 2002, was the idea of the Chicago firm PRM Realty, which saw a niche market for custom housing in Wailea, a sybaritic resort dotted with luxury hotels but lacking single-family dwelling. The company acquired a parcel zoned for a hotel and decided instead to build a group of carefully arranged homes on five beachfront and nine hillside lots. “It was kind of a risk for us to take an oceanfront site in Hawai‘i within Wailea that’s zoned for a three-hundred-plus-room hotel and embark on building a fourteen single-family residential subdivision,” says PRM managing principal Robert Harte. “We’ve spent a significant amount of time understanding the market.” Their understanding was thorough enough: nine of the properties have sold, including Hale Ola, which was on the market for less than a month. Its buyer obviously enjoyed how Maluhia architect Francis Oda, the chairman and CEO of the Honolulu firm Group 70 International, had used pocketing doors to maintain the first floor’s cavernous indoor-outdoor flow and had angled the home’s footprint like a boomerang that gently spoons the rectilinear swimming pool. Inside, the buyer liked the private garden with outdoor shower off the downstairs master bedroom and must have appreciated the use of island woods, from the chocolate heart eucalyptus floors to the natural ‘ohi‘a columns and the sumptuous mahogany trim. The interior of each Maluhia home is not only designed around an imaginary resident but also themed around a single Pacific Rim country and native Hawaiian plant. Hale Ola’s patron nation is China, and its official plant is hala, the Pandanus tree with blade-like leaves (called lau hala) more than two feet long. There’s a stone carving of a hala tree on the wall at the home’s front entrance from a botanical drawing by Group 70 International Vice Chair Sheryl Seaman. In the living room, a street-side window is obscured by screen featuring an abstraction of the hala root, also designed by Seaman. The stair to the upper floor sports a lau hala wood carving all the way up the balustrade. Actual lau hala fiber is custom-woven on several of the home’s vaulted ceilings to provide texture. Satisfying the home’s Chinese theme with items like antique paving stones, which now serve as nightstands in the upstairs master bedroom, required several trips to Asia by Seaman, the interior architect and designer, and PRM senior vice president Larry Frej, project director. Seaman and Frej visited dozens of artists in China to acquire the home’s contemporary Chinese collection. “I didn’t just walk into a studio and buy a bunch of stuff,” says Frej, who chose the pieces over the course of a year. Yet the most vexing challenge was finding the graceful armchairs that now surround the dining table. Such chairs are typically made only in matching pairs and are used in Chinese households at an entry table on which the family’s ancestral shrine is placed. Looking for a full dining ensemble was like expecting to find six identical earrings in one person’s jewelry box. Seaman and Frej canvassed Chinese anitque dealers for days before finally unearthing a set of six in a warehouse outside Beijing one bitterly cold February night. “I’d reconciled myself to the fact that it was just going to be a collection of pairs,” says Seaman. “These people pulled out a chair and said, we have six of these.” The antique items, like Sung dynasty ceramics and ethnographic objects from New Guinea, are skillfully interposed with the pieces Seaman designed, like the headboard, chairs, ottomans, and desk in the upstairs master bedroom and the mahogany entertainment center in the den. In the dining room she placed a game table custom designed with exotic wood veneers. Frej selected the wall color – which Seaman describes as “brownish-goldish-olive” – for the walls throughout much of the first floor. Seaman applauded the choice. “Spec houses are often too vanilla,” she says. “Beige and taupe and porridge.” In Hawai‘i, of course, the boldest colors usually lie outside the windows. Watching the tangerine sun ease into the Pacific every evening, the owners of Hale Ola and the other hillside Maluhia properties are assured that their panoramic vistas (“view corridors” in developer parlance) will remain unspoiled: no new homes, no power lines or towering hedges. Even an offending tree on a neighbor’s property could be ordered removed. “We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on what I would call the soft goods here, which are the bundle of property rights a buyer gets,” Harte says. Sweeping views, yet every angle is covered – that sweet paradox could be the motto of Maluhia. “The big difference between these houses and others in the market is the incredible amount of intellectualization that goes into them,” says Seaman. “Every single thing was hand-picked.” The House of Life, it seems, will remain a house of beauty – inside and out – for as long as Hawaiian sunsets continue to please the eye.