 You all back to think, take Hawaii, checking on if paradise continues to be paradise as far as the balance of the natural and the built environment. And today is going to be a special event again with a very special guest and we're just actually staying in the hood. And the hood is basically where we are natives of some less, some more. And so these are the boys from the hood here. And so we have DeSoto Brown and we have Ron Lindgren. And we're all Waikikians in different ways and if we can get the first picture up here. If you guys go please on the web and you Google an interview with one and only Edward Killingsworth, interviewed by Harvey Keller on minute two of approximately an hour. You will actually hear Ed talking about the previous show's project, which is the former seaside hotel. No shoreline or whatever. We don't mind. We don't care. But so right after that he points out to the project we want to talk about today and he says it is in the jungle. So I will leave it to the two other guys from the block here to talk about that and in the jungle. And just one little editorial comment at the top right. We've been using automobiles or means of transportation as vehicles for thought. And we will continue to do that. As we go through this. However from the picture two on we have for a certain reason chosen the automotive brand of DeSoto. Yes we have. Because DeSoto is going to start out to talk about what's his relationship to our hood. And if you can get the camera back to studio for one more second here. I just bought this here from postcard stand and we're going to be in Waikiki and we're going to be particularly here in this very corner. Correct. But let's kick off and go back to slide number one and you tell us about that history of that place. Well we're looking at Waikiki. Obviously everybody can see Diamond Head in the background. What Ron was commenting on that he didn't realize how much of a marshland or how much wetland there had been in Waikiki. And in fact Waikiki was. It's called Waikiki because that means spouting or bubbling water because there were fresh water springs there. In the upper right corner we see early transportation a horse drawn tram that plied the streets of Honolulu. Well let's go to the next picture and this is what we're talking about. We're talking about the Holly Coulomb Hotel. Yes go ahead Ron. And I have to jump in as an architect because this picture just blows me away. It shows the local famous architect C.W. Dickey's absolute mastery of residential tropical wooden architecture. And especially those famous Dickey roofs with their varied roof lines. Those really widely extended eaves and the signature double pitch. And it all goes together to make incredibly pleasing proportions. Yes and these cottages were on the grounds of the Holly Coulomb Hotel. And that's what we're talking about today. This is from the 1920s and that's why I googled the 1920s to Soto. There it is. And there it is. So these are when you went to the Holly Coulomb Hotel for many many years up until about 1980. It was a group of cottages. Small buildings that looked residential and that is something that's important that we're going to get coming back to. Going to the next photo. We see again more views of those cottages. Lots of palm trees. And so when you talk about the jungle there was some elements of the jungle there. The Holly Coulomb was particularly low rise and comfortable compared to the Moana Hotel and the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Which are the big hotels of that time which looked grand. You had to be dressed up. This again looked more like you were on a family vacation if you will. And once we go to the next slide I want to ask you because of course you know of all this because you're the historian. But there's another more personal reason why you have these pictures and you know so well about it. Well this is a picture of the main building at the Holly Coulomb which was constructed about 1930. And it also even though it had the dining room and it had the check-in desk it looks residential as well. This was where my mother and her family were staying on the morning of December 7th 1941. My grandparents were in a room on the second floor of this building. And my mother and her brother were moved from another one of those cottages to be in this building so that they were all together in case there was another attack. That's why it meant a lot to my mother. She was still alive at the age of 99. There we go. And she continues to look at this from her place further up the hill. That's right. That's right. So next picture. Here's the original dining room and it has this very distinctive basalt lava rock walls and arches which were a feature of the building at the time that it was built. And we've talked about that in previous shows the use of basalt lava rock. The only thing that this did was it made the interior quite dark. So the outside was very bright and the inside was kind of dark and it made it sort of difficult during the day when you were dining in there. Next picture. And this and Ron this is something that's near and dear to you too. The original lobby of the Holly Kulani in the building we've been talking about looks very much like a home. It looks like a grand home. It has a working fireplace which you see in the distance on the far wall. It's got this comfortable wicker and retan furniture. It has elements of Hawaiian design in it. Some paintings flanking the fireplace that are of surfers and a net fisherman. And it's got kappa on the wall. Again, but very very low key. And I found I was lucky to find a convertible disorder. There we go. To do justice to and it gets us to the next picture please that this was a convertible room, right? Right. The big vista that you're looking through right there in this postcard from 1941 is where the steps are today to come into that lobby which then you can turn to the left and go to the orchids restaurant. And there's a soda up in the corner too. Will be for a while. There we will. Different one. That's right. And they evolved. Next picture. And there in again in 1941 is the dining room in a color photograph. You're looking out and you're seeing diamond head in the distance and again the very distinctive lava rock walls. And those walls are not visible anymore. But we are going to see that a lot of this original building was kept when the building was remodeled and Ron was deeply involved in that. Absolutely. Yeah. And that seems to be the place where I should jump in and introduce myself as a very lucky architect chosen to design the new Holly Colony. And one of the blessings that I had as the designer was the existence of this lower house. Yeah. We saved it. It was again a CW Dickey building. But this time it was in concrete and the Dickey roof was framed up in steel. But what I found it was so easy to take the existing building and it's two two-story light wells and convert it into a place that would be restaurants and meeting rooms and public toilets and making it a real central home in the new Holly Colony. And very skillfully. And there's also a little club in there too. There's a little bar. That's got jazz music too. The lure is loud. Yeah. Let's go to the next slide and indulge a little bit more in the history that you were building upon, Ron, so literally and figuratively. And this car here I didn't have to put another one because that's so clear about which area that is. Because there's a 1951 Buick Park right in front of it. Okay. A bit more 50-ish, right? Yes. Because now we come up into the 50s. Exactly. And then one more 50s here or I think late 50s next slide here is these marvelous sort of advertisement and postcards you always have in your treasure box. Yeah. And what gets me going as the more next generation Americano is the next one, which I love the graphic arts and design from the 60s as you can clearly tell by that. And this is about the time where they were discontinuing the DeSoto. Sorry for that. That's okay. We got to live with that. But the sister of mother company Chrysler took. Yes. So we're going to continue with Chrysler. Right. But I love that that card here that is dwelling upon actually an element that has always been the character of the side. And thanks to you, Ron, continues even more is the natural environment being at least as important, if not more important than the built environment. And that in the middle of what's actually a concrete jungle is really amazing. Yeah. And I also want to just point out too, this is the logo type that the hotel still uses. Yeah, go ahead, Ron. Yeah. When you look at that picture, you'll see that CW Dickie actually provided 27 different cottages, almost all with different plants. And they have one little error, perhaps, in that near the seawall, it says White Sand Beach. And of course there never was a White Sand Beach there. Yeah. Right. There's just the seawall. That's right. Absolutely. The postcard here and the drawing, which I kept the original color of a 1970s Chrysler here. This is the Liberans, so they discontinued the DeSoto, so we jump to the Liberans now as the followers. So this is typical color of the brownish, and that's typical for the 70s. Oh, yeah. That was the previous project, the seaside. So this is the 70s and all the cottages still there. And you were exchanging in an emotional discussion prior about the cottages' faith and maybe missed opportunities. You guys want to share a little bit? Well, Ron, you pointed out that before the demolition and the clearing of the site happened, that the hotel offered to let people take the Dickie cottages for free, and nobody took them up on it. And I'm not sure why that was, but I conjectured maybe because they had termites or maybe because it was just so logistically difficult to get them out into the streets of Waikiki and transport them somewhere else. But alas, they did not get tapped. But you can see in this site map, which was just something given to the guests, what the original layout of the hotel was and how much that got juggled when it got rebuilt. But I think very successfully juggled, too. And it's from here on, move on to the next slide. And I want to pass on the baton to you, Ron, more here because these are all these pictures. The previous ones were from the Soto's Treasure Box and obviously Family Archive and a combination of that. And here, these are the pictures that you have used and will continue to use. You have another presentation coming up. And this one was one that you gave as part of the Dokomomo National Symposium where you guys were both keynote speakers. And that was actually the beginning of your speech. So share with us, Ron, why this picture is so typical and representative for the beginning of your endeavors into redesigning the new Helicalani. Well, again, this picture shows another blessing that I was given as a designer for the hotel because the site has these wonderful direct views of Diamond Head Crater. And we wanted to take advantage of that in every way that we could because it was such a glorious site in sunrise and sunset. So the next photograph actually shows one example of that same view from a sweet lanai looking out again towards Diamond Head. I would say that's a very sweet lanai. It's a lanai of a sweet and it's a sweet lanai. And let's move to the next slide and see what it sort of was picking up on, right? This was the inspiration. I had stayed at the Helicalani several times even before I ever had an inkling that I might be involved in design efforts there. And this was a photograph I found of how residential this site has always been. Once Waikiki was sort of drained of its marshes, I guess, back in the Victorian era, all of a sudden these private, beautiful wooden homes were showing up all over along the beach at the site of the Helicalani. Then in 1917, the Helicalani Hotel and Resort actually opened on that site. And then in 1931, in the next photograph, is when CW Dickey did come in and build 27 cottages and build that glorious Lewer's house as well. So the hotel has always had the history of being a residential scale. Obviously, the urban Waikiki grew up around this place and the Helicalani became a really sweet and odd anomaly as a wooden village at the base of Sheraton's 30-story concrete guest room tower. Yes, exactly. And we're always seating in our little pictures, little as we call it, details or glimpses of the design. And here's again the natural environment, the historic picture of the palm trees look so nice and straight while the ones on the right pictures we took when you toured me around your project. They're kind of so basically trade wind bent, right? Why is that, Ron? Yes. That was some of the most fun I had. The contractors and landscape subcontractors went all over the island of Oahu, looking in people's backyards, buying large mature cocoa ponds. And they gave each owner quite a nice sum for those and then they were trucked down to the site. It was my job and the landscape architect's job when they put them into the ground to make sure that they were all sort of leaning the same way so they looked like they had all been there together for a very long time. And talking trees, let's go to the next slide and talk another very famous iconic tree on the side on the grounds. This photograph shows a how tree that until 2016 was standing and looking that well at the age of 129. But for me as the architect, what I was trying to do in terms of residential scale, this is a restaurant called the House Without a Key, which in the middle again of high-rise urban like the key is strictly a one-story house. And again, the picture on the right we took together, this is what the hotel people very empathically say, you know, you were sharing the age of the tree and they said, you know, our tree got a little tired, so it needed to rest and lay down. And it did. And it did. Unrooted and it's on the side, but it's still alive. It's still green. That's right. And one of the things that I commented on was when you compare the House Without a Key today to what it was before, the rebuilding moved it back considerably. So that gave a lot more space between it and the seawall for there to be space for people to sit and for performers really increased the use of this beachside art. And it's also true for the extension of the building configuration. Let's go to the next slide because there's another restaurant called the Orchid and that we see here. Ron, you tell us why you've wasted this way or why you kept it that way. Well, in this case, again, you see that just as the House Without a Key, the Orchids restaurant also had a view of Diamond Head. And then the nighttime gourmet restaurant, La Mer is up on the second floor also with the view of Diamond Head. I decided to extend the restaurant out from the face of the building, but in a way where it wouldn't look like it was necessarily new construction or maybe something that had been added on over the years. And so it's just a cloth canopy. And what's glorious about it is you do get a coarse light, tropical light, diffuse light coming through the canopy and creating a really nice atmosphere for dining. And here you've seen a lawn with just interspersed with a few palm trees. Several of those are actually original, but the others are brand new. And here's a lawn that separates the diners at Orchids from the tens of thousands of people who walk along the seawall every day. But I must say that in my mind, the seawall was a blessing because it brought ocean wave action right up to the Ahalakani's property line. And then sometimes there are people who just kind of step over like they can walk right in and there's a picture of some man doing that. Like these wild ones, the natives. You see a wild guy that's just climbing in over the wall. Well, this is actually who took this picture. It wasn't me, I don't take selfies. I didn't take it. Zuma Lee Ron took it. I confess that I was at the hotel enjoying a morning repast and some character came by giving a shaka sign. And I turned around and take a shot only to find out it was our friend. And he was yelling at you in a German accent. It gives me a chance to say I'm not just walking half naked there, but I'm also doing it inside and their security and they accept me. So I have to say it's of course an elitist place because the rooms are $500 and up. So it's not egalitarian what we usually care for, but we have to say it's not exclusive because otherwise you would be kept out. That's right. So it's inclusive. They allow people, the general public in its various ways, as you can tell, to experience. So it's a very democratic place in space. And let's go to the next slide because I wouldn't have never done that if our exotic escapism expert, Susanna, hadn't lured me in. And she basically said, let's go inside and it was a little hesitant. And I'm saying that's not my clay and tail. But she basically did. And so you always and often talk about your architecture and the places and settings as being a romantic thing wrong. Can you dwell upon that a little bit? And you, by the way, I think you had us out for the orchid the other night and Susanna was with us remotely on the phone. So that was a very romantic threesome evening. Sort of, yes. Well, then don't misinterpret that. Don't misinterpret that. Yeah. This photograph shows the blessing that this particular architect had. And here's here's someone putting out the morning fresh flowers. The fact is, as architects, we were responsible for creating a suitable tropical setting for the guests. And also to create the working environment for the employees. But the fact is that might have attracted some certain travelers for the first year. But it's only the incomparable service, food and comforts that management and their employees provide that made this hotel success. You know, talking. Are you comfortable to talk about the aunties? Oh, yeah, I should mention that. One of the happiest moments I had, staying at the Holly Plenty, even before I knew I might be involved with on Tuesday afternoon, every Tuesday afternoon at a restaurant. I think it was called the Howell only room in Lewis House. All of the all of the descendants female descendants of Hawaiian royalty gathered. And I gathered near them because it was so much fun. They were all there to talk, story, to eat and to drink quite a bit. And you know, there's there's one there's one guy there who is upon request giving a hotel guest a very special tour. And she knows all the details and always, you know, when she sees me, she talks about your client, Mr. Okura. She knows in person. So I have to ask her if she's a niece of one of the aunties or if she knows the stories yet to come. She's got to tell some stories. Exactly. Storytelling. So why don't we go into the living room next slide? Yeah, and you show us around one. You know, you perhaps remember having seen just a few minutes before what the living room for the hotel look like back before our redesign or renovation of the Lewis House. And so again, it is a living room and the comfortable one, furnished only with comfortable furniture and a number of beautiful fresh flower bouquets that are always changed each day. And over the two-story wooden fireplace mantel. And by the way, that fireplace is the only working fireplace in Waikiki. Another blessing occurs in the sense that my Japanese client locally, the president of the Holly County Corporation was a bit of a francophile. And he and his wife went to Paris and they found this rather odd and rather mesmerizing painting, not particularly Hawaiian, called After the Ball. And he contributed it as a piece of artwork on that fireplace mantel. Somehow it reminds me, and I wanted to put the picture in, but you go back to the show of the Kahala Apartments and the very famous paintings there. Oh, that's true. It's sort of the same kind of notion to be a little bit of a provocateur using the French, right? All that shaking things up. This might be the place to jump in and talk about the fact that I was blessed even before the construction started. The client wanted us to be their architect and I was working for Edward Killingsworth. First of all, because they love the Kahala Hilton, the original Kahala Hilton. And second, when they bought the property, they also bought the nearly completed working drawings that we already had for the previous client, which was the Weyerhauser Lumber Company of Seattle. The client asked us to come out, have someone come out, so that we could introduce ourselves and we would have a person in the relationship. So, Ed Killingsworth and I flew out. We immediately had some fine times and were whined and dined and were pretty well convinced that we were going to get this project. But then they threw us a curve. We had a command performance to meet with the chairman emeritus of the entire Okura Hotel Corporation, which is the fathered corporation of the Holly Clooney. So Ed and I were really nervous about this because even though he had sort of a symbolic position, he also had tremendous influence in decision-making about anything to do with hotels. So we went in to meet him with some trepidation and we were by ourselves with this gentleman. He turned out to be a very elegant man almost in his 90s. We spoke perfect English because in his younger days he ran hotels in New York City. So we got acquainted and things seemed to be going well. All of a sudden he threw us a curve because he said, do you know much about Japanese literature? And if you do, what's your favorite Japanese novel? Well, before Ed jumped in, I chimed in, well that would be Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. Well, the chairman just dreamed and he ran from here to here because he said then, you know, he's one of my best friends ever since college days. They went to school with each other, right? And amazing coincidence and a blessing, but more of a blessing than you think because the thought is that's the only Japanese novel I've ever read. Well, there you go. Well, it was meant to be. It was obviously meant to be. And maybe we also want to share because we were talking, let's go back even more. There was a pre-design for the hotel by one of the other great soon-to-become hospitality design tycoons, Pete Wimbley, right? Oh! You want to chip that? Annick Dalton, really quick. Ron? Yeah. Yes, the client showed us a scheme that they had looked at, indeed. And it was very simple and in its simplicity, it was very compelling in the sense that it was another tower, the same height, 300 feet as the Sheraton Tower. But what made it so amazing was all around the tower, completely filling up all of the Halakani property, was the most amazing water park I've ever seen or imagined. Waterfalls, slides and lazy rivers beyond with inner tombs and swans on lakes and a place to dive in with scuba equipment and look at reef fish. You know, it could have been a great success in its sense. It just wasn't what the client had in mind. Well, I'm glad you guys won out and did what you did versus the Wimbley watery fantasy. Let me put it that way. Wet design was the firm, the landscape or the water design company, right? All right. So we're actually running out of time, which is actually not a problem because we had intended to make this two shows, but now we decide, as spontaneous, we're going to make it three shows. We are going to have to make it three shows. This is when we want to because this is too exciting. Yes. And you guys watching probably wonder, when do we see the architecture, right? Because we only have seen places and stories and that's actually the way you actually experience the hotel. Yes, we're going to analyze you. We're going to tease you. Teasing you, yeah. And get you more and more excited. And I promise to be back again for the next two weeks. You better. It's really a pleasure to join you for a conversation on both the social history and the design history of this place. Great. We can't wait. And you guys all as well. And until then, please stay very tropical, exotically, romantically, Waikiki and Halikulani Lee. Bye-bye.