ON A SUNDAY afternoon in Honolulu in the mid-1950s, a local psychiatrist, Linus Pauling Jr., visited Vladimir Ossipoff at home to discuss a project that he hoped the architect would consider building for his family. Pauling, then in his early 30s, found the master of Hawaiian Modernism sitting on the floor repairing a paper lamp by another great midcentury designer, Isamu Noguchi. Though Pauling and Ossipoff had hardly spoken before their meeting, he decided to roll up his sleeves and help fix the delicate cylindrical lantern. As Pauling shared his dreams of building an elemental house from locally sourced materials with lots of space for books and an open kitchen, dining and sitting room where he could cook and converse with friends and family, a bond that would span generations was born. By the end of their meeting, the two men had not only mended the lampshade (Ossipoff’s granddaughter donated it to the Noguchi Museum in New York City this past July) but Ossipoff had sketched the beginnings of Pauling’s house, which would be successfully completed within just a couple of years.
Cloistered on a ridge of Oahu’s Koolau Range — a 37-mile-long, accordion-shaped series of mountains that bisects the island — the house, Kuahiwi, is as both Pauling and Ossipoff had intended: an expansive but minimal structure that exists harmoniously with the surrounding nature. Fifteen hundred feet above sea level and hidden from passers-by who crest Round Top Drive, a canopy-covered road with many hairpin turns, the house delivers both privacy (another Pauling prerequisite) and procession (an Ossipoff specialty). A steep driveway is flanked by dramatic thickets of tall bamboo. Shaded by two old-growth magnolia trees, the six-bedroom residence was plotted by Ossipoff in a series of structures arranged in the shape of a hexagon, resembling a giant honeycomb that fits snugly into the craggy mountainscape. Kuahiwi is positioned to catch the microclimate’s strong trade winds and daily showers, which obviate the need for air-conditioning and provide potable water by channeling rain from the corrugated roof into two 15,000-gallon cisterns. The angular exterior, made of smooth planks of redwood, is blunted by a rough-edged base of cement and basalt, the local blue-gray lava rock once used to anchor boats in Honolulu’s harbor. A cavernous breezeway was first an outdoor play den for Pauling’s five children and later became an ad hoc carport for a stable of vintage Porsche 356s that Pauling and his second wife, Stephanie, would restore. With its clear view to the swaying emerald green bamboo that buffers the perimeter, the darkling space blurs the lines between the house and the wild tropics beyond it, alive with birdsong and vine-choked walking trails.
“THE HEXAGONAL MODULE, nobody had ever seen that before,” says Stephanie, 78, in the kitchen-sitting-dining room of Kuahiwi beneath the vaulted ceiling of lime-washed Douglas fir. “It probably raised Linus’s eyebrows a bit,” she says, but Linus, a progressive Harvard Medical School graduate whose father was a two-time Nobel laureate biochemist and antinuclear peace activist, was forward thinking enough to appreciate Ossipoff’s pioneering views on environmental conservation and granted him carte blanche. On this cool August morning, Stephanie is sitting on one of the house’s many built-in pieces of furniture designed by Ossipoff: a low, wide sofa upholstered in cream-colored bouclé. Across from her, Ossipoff’s granddaughter Keira Alexandra, 56, a graphic designer and teacher at the Rhode Island School of Design, is seated on one of a pair of chairs that Linus fashioned from the seats of a 1930s Riley car and fitted with legs carved from koa, a dark native wood, by the local Modernist sculptor Merle Boyer. Sunlight streams through six large windowpanes in the spare dining area, casting a muted glow over a narrow 12-seat table and the adjacent counters in the kitchen, which are also carved from koa. Over the past decades, the two women have developed a deep bond, spending summer visits together and supporting each other through major family losses: the Paulings comforted Alexandra during the passing of her grandparents and mother and, more recently, Alexandra was there for Stephanie after Linus’s death at 98 in 2023. The women discuss the magic of Kuahiwi around a coffee table designed by Linus and a copper-hooded fireplace that has made the room a central gathering spot over the years: how Linus’s vision for an open kitchen, dining and sitting area was way ahead of its time in the 1950s; how the house’s rooms — which oscillate between compact and expansive — create an intimacy that belies its 6,899-square-foot size. “It’s a big house,” says Stephanie. “It’s a big house, but it’s human,” Alexandra adds. “Each volume accommodates a closeness.”
Indeed, walking through the recessed front door into Kuahiwi’s oblique entryway — a dim, low-ceilinged antechamber — feels a lot like climbing into the hull of a brig. “Suddenly you feel like the house encompasses you,” Stephanie says, remarking that the effect is more cocooning than claustrophobic. Next, one encounters a gentle flight of five wooden steps up to the main-floor landing with built-in bookcases, a spot that Ossipoff conceived as the house’s liminal space. Turn right and you’ll find the kitchen-sitting-dining room and a set of stairs ascending to a corridor that leads to the bedrooms. Turn left and you’ll discover a library and living room with more built-in bookcases and plate-glass windows overlooking Diamond Head, an extinct volcanic crater, and the Waikiki coastline. When Linus entertained friends, the room became “an active place,” Stephanie says, where her husband would pluck books from shelves to reference during lively discussions about the local opera or classical music. Considering the room’s dual uses, for both solitary and social time, Ossipoff installed low benches at the bases of the bookcases with overhead lighting so that they could be used as seats for cocktail-party guests or a lone reader. From each room, Ossipoff delivers a new framed view of the vibrant gardens. The grounds were designed by George Walters, one of the first landscape architects in Hawaii, and planted with Medinilla multiflora, shrubs of puakenikeni — a plant with fragrant cream-colored flowers often used in lei making — and a resilient koa tree. The unimposing swimming pool is surrounded by Hawaiian tree ferns, with their expansive crinkle-cut leaves, and citrus-bearing plants, all maintained by a caretaker who resides in a wooden two-story, three-bedroom, 1,232-square-foot guest cottage that sits amid eucalyptus trees off of the main driveway.
When Ossipoff finished Kuahiwi in 1957, the architect, often referred to as the Father of Hawaiian Modernism, was at a career high, known for his signature blend of traditional Japanese and American midcentury styles, his use of local materials and his incorporation of indoor-outdoor spaces. In any of Ossipoff’s designs, one is likely to find at least one lanai, a Hawaiian-style roofed porch, interior courtyard or pathway that meanders around the perimeter of a dwelling, all meant to highlight the natural beauty of the islands, which he saw transform from an agrarian U.S. territory into the 50th state. Though he was born in 1907 in Russia, Ossipoff grew up in Tokyo, where his father, a military attaché, worked for the Russian embassy. It was there that he first encountered Modernism by way of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Imperial Hotel and the spare restraint of traditional Japanese architecture, both of which profoundly affected him. In 1923, the family immigrated to Berkeley, Calif., where Ossipoff attended high school and later studied architecture at the University of California. After graduation in 1931, he decided to visit Honolulu with an old classmate, and eventually set up a practice there. Over the next 60 years, he’d create more than 1,000 projects across the islands, including Kahului Airport, the first modern commuter air terminal on the island of Maui, and Laupahoehoe, a school on the Big Island that he rebuilt after the original 1883 structure was destroyed by a tsunami. But it is on Oahu, Ossipoff’s home until his death at 90 in 1998, that he left the greatest legacy. Generations of wealthy Honolulu residents have experienced his unpretentious designs, from surfers who find fellowship in the flat-roofed Outrigger Canoe Club, a private oceanfront structure propped up by concrete pillars embedded in coral rock, to downtown businesspeople who mill around the indoor-outdoor card rooms at the Pacific Club, their children attending services at the Punahou School’s 500-seat Thurston Memorial Chapel, which descends into a natural spring-fed pond.
Although his public structures remain a prominent part of his legacy, the purest expression of Ossipoff’s vision can be found in his domestic work — especially Kuahiwi. The house “almost spirals out from the mountain,” says Kristi Cardoso, the executive director of the Liljestrand Foundation, a nonprofit that owns and operates the Liljestrand House, Ossipoff’s most recognized residential design, which is on the ridge opposite the Pauling house and available for public tours. Unlike the more linear floor plan found at Liljestrand, Kuahiwi’s, with its coiling layout and myriad built-in bookshelves, is “more cerebral,” says Cardoso. The home is also one of the few built by Ossipoff that is occupied by the original owner’s family, a testament to the Paulings’ attachment to Kuahiwi. Starting in the 1970s, Ossipoff would regularly visit the Paulings for dinner at Kuahiwi “about every 10 days,” Stephanie estimates.
Alexandra, who rarely heard her grandfather discuss his architectural philosophy, would sometimes watch him walk through the house’s entryway and up the steps, pausing at the top to take in the space as he intended. More than once she heard him say, “This is a good one.” It is.
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