By Tim Ryan

Just before New Years day some eight years ago, Hawai‘i architect Nancy Peacock sped to Lanikai from her Honolulu office to meet a potential client who with his wife had purchased a spectacular beachfront lot through Coldwell-Banker Pacific Properties Realtor Anne Oliver.

Peacock knew the man’s name but didn’t recognize it as a writer married to a famous actress. Peacock was especially excited about a Lanikai project where she and her family had “visited and played at the beaches” decades earlier.

“I’ve always loved that place and those classically simple Lanikai beach cottages that are disappearing,” she says.

The slender, smiling man in T-shirt, shorts and slippers stood near the property’s carport and a “very funky” guesthouse. Near the shoreline was something that caught Peacock’s eye and touched her architectural soul — the main house was original Lanikai cottage style.

“I could tell it was high quality construction…and mostly solid redwood,” she recalls. “It was in remarkably good shape.

“It was a wonderful old home with great bones.”

The structure, which Peacock says was built in the late 1920s and Realtor Oliver believes in the 1930s, is on the State and National Register of Historic Places.

Introducing himself by first name, the man told Peacock what he didn’t want built on the Mokulua Drive site.

“I don’t want a house for Architectural Digest,” he said. “I want a house I can live in and where a family can be comfortable” that included the couple’s two young children. “What I want is a nice beach house.”

Peacock had designed a home like that across the street, so the pair went visiting.

“There were toys and other kids’ stuff all over the floor, and swimsuits and beach things hanging outside,” Peacock says.

“He smiled and said ‘I like this. You’re hired, so get started.’”

By this time, Peacock’s curiosity had gotten the best of her.

“So what do you do?” she says.

The man “ah shucks” style said he worked in the entertainment industry. Then he said his actress wife’s name.

“I think I just smiled,” Peacock says.

(In the case you’re wondering, the couple in question insists on anonymity.)

So began for Peacock a two-year odyssey, including seven months for design work and obtaining permits, of “exacting restoration” and “impeccable” attention to detail for phase one restoration of the main and “funky” guest house.

(The couple would purchase the adjacent property — expanding their “sandy beach” beachfront to about 140 feet — where Peter Vincent, another Honolulu architect, would build a swimming pool, pool house, covered patios and a courtyard. This phase took about 18 months.)

The entire two-part project, including fine-tuning the landscaping using only native Hawaiian plants, was completed in late 2001. The three structures on the nearly half-acre site include three bedrooms in the primary home and two in the guesthouse, and with the pool house provide 4,456 square-feet of “interior area,” realtor Oliver says.

The finished product is a time warp of a long-ago comfortable Hawaii. The single-story main house is the largest of the property’s three structures at about a modest 2,000 square-feet of interior space. The guest and pool houses mimic the main house with open lanais, board-and-batten walls, ohia floors and high-vaulted white ceilings. Big Island fine wood worker Peter Ziroli crafted 40 ohia doors for the buildings.

It was the client’s firm yet subtle insistence to maintain the main home’s historical integrity, and to build “nothing that overwhelms the land” that united architects, contractor and landscapers, Vincent says.

For the pool house, “they wanted it to be the essence of a 1930s beach house, a genuine feel of casual, comfortable but absolutely not pretentious,” he says. “We took the character of the original house and reshaped it into this new structure.”

The rarely used board and batten walls “give the surfaces a special texture and scale that’s extremely nice,” Vincent notes.

Painting the walls and ceiling in muted shades, like the other structures, allows “color to come from the view, art work and furnishings,” he adds.

The original pool house design called for three bedrooms until Vincent had a visit from the husband.

“He told me ‘I have good news and bad news,’” Vincent says.

The actress wife had had an epiphany about the project, but the man said, “The good news is she only has one epiphany per project.”

The bedrooms were eliminated and the focus would be “a pool house strictly for recreation,” Vincent says.

Meanwhile, Chris Emerson of contracting company The Renovators recalls the “special challenges” of restoring history — especially since this was the first project of this nature that The Renovators had undertaken.

From day one, the owners insisted the renovation should remain true to the property’s history and avoid ‘overwhelming the land.’

The interior designer painted walls and ceilings in muted tones to allow colors to come from the view, art work and furnishings.

“We learned a ton, from working to stain concrete to what it was like in that era to dealing with board and batten,” he said. “We took it on for the challenge.”

The contractor recalls that the client and architect Peacock required that every electrical switch be “centered” in the board and batten walls.

‘It’s quite a complicated formula to have it all equidistant from the batten,” Emerson says.

Phase one under Peacock began summer 1998 with gutting the guesthouse, rebuilding it from the inside out.

“There was nothing to be saved from it and it had no connection to anything on the property,” notes Peacock, describing it as a “large confused” structure. In its place is a three-bedroom and bath guesthouse on the same footprint.

In the main home, the architect recycled everything we could,” she says, adding, “if we took a door off we would used it somewhere else.”

Windows were another issue. Since none of the original 30 survived, they had to be “reinvented” and fabricated here. Hardware also was manufactured in the style of the time.

All the traditional woods used in the original construction — redwood and African mahogany — were used in the restoration as needed.

The wing of the H-shaped main house where the original galley kitchen and a “decrepit” master suite were rebuilt but without “substantially” changing the square footage, Peacock says.

Terrazzo counters, made in New York, are embellished with what appears to be “beach glass” in the 14-foot-16-foot kitchen.

While Peacock’s dealings about the project were mostly with the husband, Vincent, whose other projects include the Local Motion building on Kealakekua Avenue, worked primarily the actress.

An example of exacting historical detail is in all of the exposed framing materials in the pool house, including roof rafters and other lumber, which were special ordered then milled to reflect specific dimensions of the era and are not found today, Vincent and Emerson say.

Peacock says she was given “exceptional creative license” that extended to her designing two front “roll-along” vehicle gates in a Chinese medallion motif, and several interior gates that include fish or wave designs.

“I wanted a little bit of whimsy so I just ran with it,” she says.

What made an exacting project enjoyable for Vincent was that the homeowners were “very nice and easy to work with.”

“One afternoon (the actress) made the contractor and me home-cooked pasta for lunch,” he recalls. “That was pretty nice.”

“An architect gets to know clients intimately in a very important project,” Peacock says.

“You learn their life story, their children, passions, dreams, philosophy of living.”

Vincent agrees that there was a “real connection on this one.”

After a diseased Norfolk Island Pine near the street was removed and the wood given to a local craftsman, months later through serendipity Vincent was attending a fine woodwork sale and noticed a beautiful wood bow with the artist’s name. The bowl was made with the wood from the Lanikai tree. Vincent bought it and gave it to his former clients as a housewarming gift.

“I like that full-circle idea concept,” he says. “I still get a Christmas card from them every year.” HS