On the Kona Coast of Hawaii Island, Seattle-based architecture firm Olson Kundig and San Francisco-based interior studio Leverone Design have completed a house set directly into a lava field, its hard volcanic ground softened at every turn by what's been built on top of it.
The clients are a pair of California-based professionals, parents to two college-age daughters, who conceived the property as a vacation home destined to become their primary retreat once the girls have left for good. Family was central to the brief from the outset: a house sized for a full table, and built to expand and contract with the household's rhythms, whether that means a quiet week for two or a home full of friends.
Tour a dreamy Hawaii house made for downtime
The couple came to Olson Kundig having admired the firm's Hale Lana residence, also on the ‘Big Island’, drawn to its restraint and approach to volume. Principal Tom Kundig recalls that the clients 'were interested in a residence composed of a series of high-design pavilions rather than a single volume', an ambition that shaped the project's orientation and circulation from the first sketches.
'Ultimately,' he says, 'the goal was not to impose on the landscape, but to create a framework through which it could be experienced.'
That framework depends on a roof whose horizontal line appears to hover on slender columns across long spans, its structural complexity hidden entirely from view. Achieving that reduction, Kundig admits, made the roof 'one of the project's most technically demanding elements', requiring close work with engineers to erase every trace of effort from the finished form.
Beneath that roof, board-formed concrete, larch and basalt stone extend the lava field's palette into the house itself, while slate-clad cedar volumes hold the more private, utilitarian rooms. It fell to Matthew Leverone, founder of Leverone Design, to decide how a family might actually live inside those rooms.
The clients already knew his work: a previous project of his on Maui had shown them Leverone could soften bold architecture without diminishing it, and here that meant furniture with 'sensuous shapes and soft textures' set against the house's clean lines – a wood-framed sling chair with a leather back and wool bouclé cushions, raw teak coffee tables shaped like seed pods, woven raffia left with its structure exposed.
In the primary bedroom, concrete walls and a larch ceiling create, in Leverone's words, 'a sheltering environment – like a natural cave open to ocean views'. His one spatial addition was an upholstered wall opposite the glass façade, which he calls 'a gentle gesture that doesn't shy away from the monolithic presence but instead stands with the same dignified character as the architecture itself'.
Elsewhere, Leverone traded wall-to-wall closets in the guest rooms for freestanding wardrobes in bleached larch, steel and leather – a calculated move that opens up the rooms while keeping every inch of storage the brief required. The same instinct guided the art collection throughout the house: a Paul Kremer painting in tropical blues and oranges greets visitors from the media room, and a Pedro Reyes sculpture, commissioned directly from the artist and set on the entrance axis, anchors the whole sequence with what Leverone calls its 'modernised Easter Island' stillness.
In the end, the house works because two creative sensibilities dovetailed here. Kundig set the terms with the roof, and Leverone filled in the rooms below, both working with élan and from the same instinct – reduce whatever isn't essential, then make sure what's left is warm enough to live with.
