By Mark Doyle

It's a modest home, by $12-million-dollar standards. That is, if you can afford this price, you could easily find larger, more ornate houses just down the beach for the same money … maybe one of those "look at me" palaces that are starting to pepper the shoreline from Aikahi to Lanikai.

But at 55 Kailuana Place, tucked back on a lazy, manicured road that meanders along the canal behind Pinky's Pupu Bar and Grill in Kailua, all is not what it seems from the street.

An unpretentious electric gate buzzes you onto a coco palm-lined driveway topped by rounded, four-foot-wide pods of concrete cleverly puzzled together and separated by thin ribbons of green grass all the way up to the house, some 75 yards away. It's here that you first notice the depth of the compound, which consumes a full acre of one of the most expensive beachfronts in the world.

"Come on in," says a friendly voice from the front door. A wiry middle-aged man in a T-shirt sporting "Telluride" across the chest approaches with his hand out. "I'm Paul. Welcome to Castle Point."

Paul Sullivan has been a Kailua resident for 42 years. An avid armchair historian of the area, especially Kailua Beach, he purchased the home from Castle Estate in 2003 and renovated the property in 2005, adding a gorgeous lava rock pool and hot tub, eight waterfalls, extensive landscaping, complete rewiring, new plumbing, new bathrooms, new kitchen, new roofing, a home theater and a cabana off the pool to be used for entertainment or separate guest quarters.

The 5,200-square-foot home, actually listed at $11.9 million, now has five bedrooms, five and a half baths and separate roofed structures that cover another 2,350 square feet.

"That rock right there is called 'Castle Rock,'" Sullivan says, pointing to a 4-foot lava boulder sitting in a tidy tropical garden just outside the home's entrance. "Harold Castle put it there as a welcome rock when he built the house in 1946."

Harold K.L. Castle not only built the house, he lived in it for years, a warm country respite from his mountain home near Honolulu. By far the biggest landowner on Oahu's Windward side, he also owned most of the oceanfront property on Kailua Bay.

"He could have lived anywhere he wanted on this beach, but he chose to make this point his home because of the favorable weather and wind patterns," Sullivan says.

The area in front of the house, framed by two separate double garages, is "paved" with more of the concrete pods, which continue through a short open foyer into an inner courtyard with a giant natural lava rock pool and waterfalls.

"All they had before was a small rectangular pool," says Steve Mechler, a Windward landscape architect who designed and built the new pool and surrounding grounds. "Now it has a 50-foot lap lane in the middle of it."

The 8-foot pool spreads like an amoeba around landscaped ferns and coastline foliage that Mechler says he selected for their easy maintenance and tolerance to sun and salt air. Silver-leafed akia dominates much of the landscaping, the same plant that lines much of Kailua Beach and Flat Island.

An eight-jet spa spills over into the south side of the pool not far from the cabana, which features an outdoor shower, a bathroom and a large punee for reclining or sleeping. On the north end of the pool there's a 10-foot wall of stacked lava rock that looks as if it were cut naturally from a hillside. Coated at the top with slightly overgrown akia, eight jets spew graceful waterfalls that flow down the rock work into a separate pond.

As Sullivan strolls past the pool, he mentions that Castle used a portion of the long section of the L-shaped house for his kennels, where he raised Great Danes. A large laundry room occupies that space now. A bedroom next to it has been converted into an air-conditioned workout room next to a home theater with double soundproof walls.

Toward the back of the house, the porous cement pods give way to a tile walkway that either leads straight ahead into the living room or into the kitchen to the right, both covered by a beautiful sand-colored tile. The Tuscan stone, from Peru, covers the floors in most of the house, including a 16-foot-wide lanai that stretches across the entire back of the home.

Owner Sullivan says that he and his wife didn't want a grand home — they wanted a simple home on a grand property. Photo by Hal Lum

The living room, hard to recognize when the wall-sized retractable glass doors are open on either side, is tastefully adorned with indoor/outdoor furnishings, as is the lanai.

In the kitchen, around a nifty breakfast nook to the right, is a walk-in, air-conditioned pantry that keeps dry goods cool and fresh from outside humidity. The kitchen itself is large, with a full assortment of shiny new Viking appliances, a long granite-topped island and basalt counters.

The far end of the kitchen flows into a dining room that opens to the back yard and the ocean beyond.

"That's the original dining table owned by Harold Castle," notes Sullivan's wife, Karen. "We were able to go into an old shed to see if there was anything we wanted, and I found this table and some other things. It was fun, like treasure-hunting."

The Sullivans live in the home with their 10-year-old son, Thomas, and their two-year-old Irish Wolf Hound, O'Doon. The couple used to manage presidential campaigns for the likes of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before retiring in 1992. Photographs of Paul and Karen with the three politicians and others adorn a wall leading into the master bedroom.

"I'm a Hilo girl," Karen says, looking out from the dining room at the panoramic view of Kailua Bay. "I look out to the left, toward the Mokes (Mokulua Islands), and I see Hilo. I look to the right and I see Kailua Beach. It's the best of both worlds."

The bedroom wing of the house, where the three human Sullivans sleep, demonstrates the brilliance Castle exhibited when choosing this locale for his home.

"(Castle) sat out here for weeks studying wind patterns before determining that he'd build this portion of the house at an angle into the wind," Sullivan explains from the rear lanai. The wing shelters the backside of the house from strong onshore winds that wreak havoc on every other home on Kailua Beach, he adds.

The master bedroom, situated at the farthest point of the wing, has its own natural cooling system. The room is sparse — a king-size bed with a white bedspread juts out from one wall, with little else to accompany it save a Chinese steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. Dressers, vanities and closets all have their own separate rooms.

The marquee features of the room are the large windows. "There are windows on three of the four walls," Sullivan points out. "It's an incredible experience to sleep here. The breeze and the sound of the surf surround you."

The home is well appointed with tropical furnishings that are far from overdone, thanks, Karen says, to some interior design assistance from Philpotts & Associates, Inc.

"We didn't try to restore this house, because to restore it exactly the way it was would take years," Sullivan explains. "What we did was renovate it, without losing its original charm and spirit. We saved everything we could — almost all the doors and cabinets are original, with the same hardware."

One exception is the library, which used to be Harold Castle's personal office. Specially designed floor-to-ceiling shelving, brimming with books, looms over two comfortable reading chairs for a dramatic scholarly effect.

"We didn't set out to create a grand home," Sullivan shrugs. "We wanted a simple home on a grand property, and we wanted to open it to the outdoors."

Suddenly that old axiom comes to mind, the one that says the three most important things in real estate are: location, location, location. Well, at this location, a touch of history and a truly fine home come with it. HS