1 · POSITION
Invited to Hawai‘i by Governor Quinn to look for sites, he swam in Kauna‘oa Bay and took a 99-year lease on Parker Ranch land from Richard Smart. There was no road, no power and no fresh water; everything was brought in. LHL-134 Mauna Kea Beach Hotel opened in July 1965 with 154 rooms after a $15 million build — the most expensive hotel ever built at the time. Esquire called it one of the three greatest hotels in the world; the AIA gave it an award in 1967.
2 · ⚑ WHAT HE REFUSED TO PUT IN IT
The original concept was cottages with no televisions and no air-conditioning, so that nothing would come between the guest and the Kohala Coast. Edward Charles Bassett of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it open-air, ventilated by the trade winds; Robert Trent Jones Sr. worked out how to turn lava rock into soil and built the island’s first golf course on it. He was a conservationist before he was a hotelier, and the house is the argument he was making.
3 · ⚑ THE FIRST HOTEL ART COLLECTION ANYWHERE
He wanted a private estate offering a cross-cultural experience, and his team bought original artefacts and sculpture across Asia, Oceania and the Pacific — Maori canoe prows, bronze Indian dowry chests, New Guinea shields — hung so that a guest finds them rather than is shown them. Every hotel art programme in this register descends from that one, and most do not know it.
4 · CANDOUR
⚑ The estate is given as 1,700, 1,800 and 1,839 acres across sources and the entry carries all three. His dates, the rest of his career and what became of the company after his death are not established here.