 have you back for another episode, which happens to be our 227th of think tech-wise human-humane architecture. And while we're in the sequence here of happenings for reasons, this being Volume 8, our traditionally broadcasting from our traditional triangle from three different parts of the world of this triangle, we're unfortunately missing our one leg today, who is the Soto Brown back in Honolulu, Hawaii, because you're a little bit under the radar, the Soto. So hopefully, you know, get better for sure. So sorry for that. Hope you feel a bit feel better soon. But we have us back in and from Long Beach, California, our leisure legacy legend, Ron Lindgren, hi, Ron. Hello, Martin. How are you? I'm good. Good. Thank you. And I'm Ron Scassi live, as you can see here from a not that known place back in my home country in Germany, which the D.E.E.S. stands for Deutschland. And this is Koblands. And for that matter, can we get the first slide up, please? Because this has been some time travel for me, that I was traveling through the center west part of my native country. And this is where my father, who was an age buddy of yours, Ron, has his roots. And he, having grown up in this area, which we talked about briefly at last week's show, now I basically drove up to what he designed for his parents at the relatively young age of in the mid 30s. And I was driving up there. I hadn't been there for a quarter of a century. And I bravely drove up to the gate. I rang the doorbell. I said, I am the nephew of the original owner. And I am the son of their son, who is your architect. And to your surprise, Ron, because you with a house, you just shared your memories that you had designed back home in Illinois, the one and only home. You didn't have the initial refreshing, the warm, the welcoming response that I had. Because all they said was, oh, come on in. Brian, you want to quickly share your experience that was sort of in a similar situation, please? Yeah, as when I was in school one summer, I wasn't working in Europe, which was the great opportunities I had while an undergraduate. And I was working in a local architects' office, a very young firm. And they gave me the primary responsibility of designing the only house I've ever had the opportunity to do a little one story brick house surrounding a courtyard that brought light deep into the home and light and air and the sense of the sky and all the good things that courtyard houses provide intrinsically. So some 50 years after I designed it, I went to the front door and a housewife came. And I was holding actually a set of the original drawings in blueprint form. And I offered them to her. And she offered me to get out of her doorstep and get away. She had no time for me. So I did not get the welcome opportunity. Later, a second owner, some years, six or seven years after that, invited me in. And I found that unhappily, the courtyard, the amount of glass in the central courtyard had been diminished somewhat by some strange wall construction. But the home was so beautifully maintained that that was the good part. So just like life, good and bad. Exactly. So let's do some, you being a peer of my father generationally, let's do some peer review and you share your observations of what I had sent you about my findings here. Going back to the place of my best childhood memories because my parents always then dropped us off at my grandparents and I had the most beautiful summers there with my cousins and with my sister and again, nothing but the best memories. So some architectural observations from you would be appreciated, Ron. Yeah, I really appreciated what I saw in the first time without you in the picture, of course. And it's the sense of openness in that home. Open plan, sharing those aspects of Southern California mid-century architecture, including my own home, half a world away from each other. And also the connections between indoors and outdoors and you had some interesting German words, including Fui, that I think you need to explain. Exactly. And that traces back to cross-culturally to the all-American case study house attribute and attitudes which again, your colleague, boss and partner at Killingsworth was an inaugural pardon. And they're all pretty much broke with the Victorian attitude of Auson Fui and Inen Fui, which means like the house makes a lot of effort to impress you from the outside. But once you walk through this impressive gesture, you're rather disappointed. And in this tradition of the case study houses, it's more the opposite. You hardly even find the door in some cases and it looks more austere to say the least, at least how the common people experience that. And once you walk through that threshold from the public to the private, you're wowed by, as you said, an open plan, open space and blurring the indoors and the outdoors, right? And it was interesting that when your characterization is what my father echoed when he was basically responding to the pictures I sent him, he said, oh, it almost looks American. And that seems like a retrospective characterization that he didn't seem to have at least consciously, maybe subconsciously because all the architects were very, very impressed and looked up to you guys in America and the case study houses. So this is a late admitting, attributing to that one, right? Yes, and I get to have an added bonus of my own home because I have some two-story spaces that actually look into each other. And what is really a small house, little more than 1200 square feet, suddenly seemed so much larger because you're looking up at rooms above you. The sunshine is flowing in through two-story glass walls of a fine sanctuary. Yeah, and that's the same here, similarity, amazing similarities. Now owner is actually the only the second owner. So he bought it directly from my grandparents after they lived there for a little more than a decade only because they couldn't talking about a lot. A lot is rather large and it's almost like 10 times as much as the house. And this only has 1600 square feet and yours has 1200. So it's kind of the same, it's in the same, it's a little larger, but both feel much larger. And the now only second owner told me when he first approached the house, which you see on that top, the second from the top at that show quote, you see myself and my lady cousins and my sister having fun in front of the house and the house looks very, as we said in the traditional the case study houses, very nondescript. And he said when he saw it, he came across to him like a barrack and he was about to turn around and drive away and not being interested anymore. Luckily he was not doing that and walked inside and saw what you see on the bottom picture that sort of large sort of living landscape as you can call it with a fireplace as the main archetypical anchor in the center. And then all the beam structure is basically spreading out from there like an umbrella. So you can almost call it tropical rockwood has a project that he calls the umbrella house. This of course has to be heavily walled outside because again, we're talking temperate climate here. We're not talking California. We're talking more Illinois. So here we go with the analogies. We wanna make a little side reference to us soon reconvening our ongoing series of comparing automobiles to architecture because that yellow car you see up there is what made my grandfather to be the coolest grandpa around because usually grandpas drive more grand pae cars, but he didn't. He spoiled himself after retiring as an officer from the Bundeswehr, the German army with very, very hot BMW E9 from that same era. And he strategically choose this very bright, fluorescent yellow color and I will never forget that. And I once, there was a surreal situation on one of my many flights back from the heartland when it was still in Nebraska in the prairie where you're from. I was browsing through an automotive magazine that the airline had to hand out. And the guy next to me, I started to engage me in a discussion and he said, this is my car. And I said, no, this looks like my grandpa's car. And it turned out to be that he bought it from my grandpa. Is that surreal? To be us in a plane half around the world opening in a magazine, which was like a vintage car magazine, right? So totally, totally surreal story. Anyways, yeah, talking house and landscape, interior-wise and open plan and floating and flowing spaces. This house is privileged to be as the Google image at the very top right shows, to be fronting a forest directly. And so there's a lot of greenery around it. And also the house is now barely noticeable from its barric front appearance because it's all heavily vegetated. And that gets us actually back to your home with sort of retrospectively, unfortunately, but fortunately also survived. You won't believe it. Another water, not a water incidents, but an incidents of another intrusion into your world, into your domestic world Ron. And that gets us to the next slide. And then talking cars, right? Maybe we take the car as to segue into this one here because this story is around a smart car, right? And smart cars are these German cars that basically have been invented by these Swiss guys who have invented the Swatch watch and Mercedes Benz. And they wanted to just like with a watch bring, make cars accessible to most people, to all people, also to people who couldn't or didn't want to basically buy big cars. But the reason the, I think the car parking, which is not yours because you are a fan of German cars, which we will get to later in the car shows, but currently you have your Audi A4 that you talking water incidents, your water pump broke, right? So this is never ending. Hopefully it's ended now. Happy new year, different year. Water damages are over, period, right? So just now I'm thinking this is another addition to water pump damage you had, but now your Audi is back. And so here, this is not your Tacoma, but Americans basically used to refuse small cars because they said, I'm too endangered in a small car, but here you memories that you had once seen the substance of a smart car that amazed you, right? I seriously considered buying a smart car. And when I went to the dealer on display, they had just the frame of the car up on display. And this definitely small car was incredibly reinforced with its steel frame and I'm willing to bet from just my memories of that, because that car was probably even safer than larger cars because the German engineers had really considered the car and the passengers holding up in case of an accident. And I think it was almost the most rollover proof car as far as damage to passengers that I've ever seen. There you go. But that being said, that Americans bought it and as you found out the hard way, it's, well, it is so safe and sound and bullet-like that it caused another intrusion on your escapes, right? Report about that. You know, the pictures at the top, top left and top right show the fact that my home is really lost in the greenery. On-front thing, as it shows on the upper left, a beautifully manicured hillside held up by a concrete wall that in itself is beautifully manicured with ground ivy. And then to the right is my own home entry, which is merely lost in ferns and vines and tropical-like bamboo. And I had been so proud of my house, of course, and then lost it for three or four months when I had a pipe burst and I had water damage. The same week that my old furniture and furnishings and my precious books and things were coming back to the home and I was distributing them and finding myself again in familiar surroundings, a woman in a smart car swerved to avoid a head-on collision with another neighbor apparently and ended up driving her little smart car diagonally right through my gardens, which I had been so proud of. What was the loss? 30 years of tending a grove, that's probably the wrong term, but I'll say a grove of roses that I had really loved and cared for. They were gone, they were torn out and almost all of the bushes parallel to the street were gone, flowering jasmine. And after the trauma of the house damage repair and what it takes to get through that, all of a sudden my front garden was also something I could not be proud of anymore. And there's an old saying about that for those who find themselves behind the eight ball, infamy, infamy, God's got it in for me. But the lesson I learned from the home is just jump into it, take it day by day and get it done. In this case, the woman driver was so embarrassed and we were so glad obviously that she wasn't injured at all. And I got an estimate from a gardening company as to what it would take to have them replace it. I gave her the check and a day later, she gave me a check, the replanning's done. It'll take some time before the home will look as good as it did before, but it will in a year's time. And again, think these kind of travails when they don't kill you, make you stronger. So true, that's what they say and you proved it. But still, we felt for you, Ron, in this time and we thought, couldn't we just make you leave all this misery up on a plane, get back to your Hawaii, our Hawaii and relax a little bit. And so obviously, we would have liked to have you stay with us, which we get to later. But next slide gets us back to hospitality design and the appreciation of it. And the recent ranking that we had shared at the beginning of this show sequence here where of this magazine that you will remind us of now you were scoring the top poll positions with your projects but now we wanna revisit a little bit further down the ranking which is somehow very interesting as well because these are more kind of small scale, more kind of more humble, less corporate kind of also existing hotels that have been remodeled. And number six is the Kaimana Beach Hotel that we with a show called at the top left already were visiting when we heard about its renovation recently. And we were a little bit disappointed because it's substance, it's from the mid-century. So it's substance is talking courtyards, Ron. It has a courtyard and so it has single loaded corridors around the courtyard. So we were actually wishing it would take more advantage of that and apply more easy reason as we like to call it. But what we saw in the images of the hotel room interiors is very much alike of you had been elaborating a lot, right, the soul about what had happened to the hotel rooms of your Halle Kalani, right? Is that fair to say? Yeah. So we weren't so fond of that. That I think we should take a chance the solo had been updating us on the Halle Kalani and gone there recently with France to eat. And he showed you some pictures that weren't very much helping our otherwise optimism to keep the common spaces intact and unchanged, right? You wanna share that a little bit? What your feelings about what you saw? Yes, several recently with friends went back to the Halle Kalani and had a very fine and memorable meal. He sent me a few shots of the original lobby which is furnished with the only working fireplace in all of Waikiki, which has been there ever since C.W. Dickie designed the Lauer's house. The lobby space, I hardly recognize it from what my interior designer did when we took it over and re-renovated the building. The owner, a Japanese gentleman who happened to be a Francophile had purchased himself with his own money, a very strange and eerie painting called After the Ball. It hung in a prominent position right above the fireplace. And it was gone. And in its place was something that I would not even use the word art to describe. And the furniture itself was also rather stiffly arranged in the room and not so casually placed so that it looked comfortably lived in. It was just an example again of someone thinking that something has to change and why I don't know. Yeah, and probably people can call us really subjective and biased, right? Because you're the creator. And again, I was introduced by our exotic escapism expert, Susanna, to your place that we fell in love with and with each other. And so, you know, we're highly biased, right? And the origination of that painting, you guys just go back to the shows with you, Ron, that you just tried this very elegantly and eloquently. But I don't think we wanna come across as just being grumpy as Stetler and Waldorf as the Muppet Show figures up on the gallery there, right? And just ranting. Because, for example, I got you very excited about the artwork of Kaili Chut. So I can see you, Ron, when they would have replaced that picture maybe for a little while with an artwork of Kaili that tried to really engage with the history of the place and its projection, I'm sure you would have been fine with that. And as you said, only if you replace things that have, are there for a really good reason and you switch them out and your placing was something worse than there is a problem, right? Yeah, the painting was eccentric, yes, but extremely interesting. And the idea behind the lobby in the original renovation that I and my interior architect took on was that in some respects, it would be something like still furnished as it was in the 30s, almost a kind of maiden ant aspect to it. Nothing stiff, nothing particularly modern, but something harking back to those glorious times back in the 30s when the Lure's house was still built. And eccentric, memorable things, I think should remain to be eccentric and memorable for a guest experience of any hotel. Yeah, indeed. And the proof of evidence that you're open to these things is actually another rankings here. One is the Surfjack Hotel, which ranks, comes in at number eight, and that's a hotel that's mid-century and it's been updated and refreshed not to its origin, but interpretively very, and there were some several docomomo events and they're in speaking of these, when we had you as our keynote speaker at the National Symposium, we basically set you up in another retrofitting of a hotel and that is the Lay Low, and it's lobby we see at the very top right and explain us about that, your experience in that one, Ron. Yeah, what a great stay at a hotel that I had not heard of. It had been renovated. The lobby experience was open to the air on all sides, easy breezy, with a restaurant attached to it, which also provided some outdoor dining space and they took it upon themselves to use some aspects of Hawaiian kits. I'm talking about surfboards and Hawaiian shirts and in the rooms there was large leaf bamboo wallpaper that was obviously harking back. It almost reminded me of the hotels in Los Angeles that made such giant flower wallpapers famous and from my room I had a great full view of the Pink Palace. I couldn't have felt more in Honlulu historically than that and had a very enjoyable stay and suggests that people consider that if they're bringing friends from out of state for a stay, the Lalo got its honor and a little lower down the list for good reasons. Yeah, and again, we feel bad. We should have put you up in your hotel, the Hale Kolani, but due to its price range, that was not possible, right? So we're talking about more budget hotels here, right? So and the building of where the Lalo is in is a rather average. I think that's fair to say in century modern building, good in its bones and orientation is right, Malka Makai and it has the nice, right? But architecturally it's not one of the most prolific ones, but really the touch up, the renovation really improved it and there's a big large outdoor restaurant area open to the sky right next to this lobby where when Suzanne was over last time, we really had a good time. So that's improvement. And it just proves that you're not basically stuck in nostalgia and you're basically not open to evolution. No, you just prove that you're welcoming sort of contemporary interpretations of a tropical exotic as again, exemplified here in the lobby that we see with the breeze block screen that has the pool behind and rather outdoorsy furniture and the very generally vegetation in there. So we're at the end of our exciting 28 minutes and with that image at the bottom right is basically giving us a clue where we're going next because we're ongoing sharing a lot of damages. And that will happen in what you see in here which I'm a little jealous now that we didn't show up on the ranking here because it's in my home back on the island in the Waikiki Grand Hotel which has been featured here in the prestigious Monarchal Travel Guide series. And this is from their promotional video and it was incorporated and featured there because of its vintage signage in there. But what happened in that building as my contribution to the water damage series you have to wait until next week. And until then stay all healthy first of all and to solo in particular and happy and please stay a vintage-ly tropical exotic as you rock. And see you next week and dry. Yeah, see you next week. Bye-bye. Oh, yeah.