As a little kid I told anyone who would listen that, when I grew up, I was going to be an architect—a profession that, to my fantastical imagination, implied a hefty dose of interior design as well as botany and some kind of art practice on the side. I often spent hours toiling happily over imagined floor plans and elevations, laying out complex gardens that radiated outward from elaborate fountains and dreaming up fanciful bathrooms and ballrooms on spaceships—only the essentials, of course, in my whimsical vision of the future. At a certain point in my teens, I got spooked by the “math” involved and all the fastidious work at the computer. It has instead been one of the great pleasures of my adult life to work closely with artist-technicians who make my abandoned dreams their own professional reality. I am endlessly delighted by the way that architects organize information, ideas, and what they call “program,” or the nuts and bolts of how spaces work and how they come together to make a building. Hiring an architect and interior designer together—when the two are compatible, of course—and giving them equal respect and weight opens enviable opportunities to create rooms and truly memorable properties that are unified by a clearly defined set of values, a coherent sensibility. A well-executed shared vision is something you can feel from the moment you walk into a space. Among the most fruitful relationships of my professional life has been the one I’ve fostered with the Seattle-based architect Tom Kundig, which began in 2007 during our collaboration on this marvelous beach house on the Kona Coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. Beyond the sheer quality of the architectural design—sensitivity to landscape, precision craftsmanship, formal sincerity combined with technical sophistication—I’m consistently amazed by the warmth and openness that Tom and his team bring to every interaction. He’s told me more than once that I push him out of his comfort zone; for me, his clarity of purpose is a constant reminder that the simplest solution is almost invariably the best one. Here in Hawaii, that philosophy manifests in hinged shutters that open up, rather than out, over the garden cabana and the wooden walkways that traverse the property, not in contrived meanders conceived for the sake of theatrics, but direct lines from point A to point B. There’s a humble question that Tom repeats often and that I should really embroider on a throw pillow as a reminder that it should be my personal axiom: What would a farmer do? It’s the only interrogatory you need in the face of nearly any design conundrum. Efficiency, elegance, economy—these are the hallmarks not only of Tom’s work but of utilitarian, vernacular architecture and design everywhere. ↩ Our deep complicity would have been meaningless, of course, without the enthusiasm and trust of our clients. Family-oriented people with a profound love for entertaining—hence the scale of this project, set as a sequence of four wooden pavilions arranged among gardens—these clients are also attentive, decisive, and communicative. They offered encouragement whenever they could, exhibited constant respect and admiration for the entire team and, on the occasions when they were disappointed by a decision or outcome, knew how to express it without drama or recrimination. Collaboration goes beyond the so-called “creatives” behind a project’s design. Successful projects include everyone. We all knew this project represented a special opportunity—it’s not every day that an architect and designer get to design every last element down to dishes and glassware—and we treated one another with proportionate respect. Farmers cultivate. That process requires patience, know-how, and, every once in a while, a bit of ruthlessness. It also requires love.
