When Greg Warner was first asked to redesign Hawai‘i Island’s tsunami-battered Kona Village resort, he said no. His firm, the San Francisco–based Walker Warner, had no experience designing resorts, and he worried about the logistics and manpower required to lead a hospitality project with 150 guest rooms, multiple restaurants, and a spa. But resort owner Kennedy Wilson, a global real estate investment company led by Bill McMorrow, asked Warner a second time.
“He said, ‘I’m only going to ask you once again,’” Warner recalled. “And I decided to do it. Of course, I had to come back and convince the partners.”
Seven years later, guests can judge whether Walker Warner’s grounded interpretation of the beloved midcentury, tiki-themed outpost on Kahuwai Bay succeeds. The goal was to preserve the unique, intimate travel experience that first drew people to Kona Village while updating the property to meet the expectations of the modern traveler—and a climate-conscious state.
What neither Warner nor McMorrow could have anticipated was the challenging moment in which Kona Village would be reopening. Both the pandemic and the wildfires that destroyed the Maui community of Lahaina brought long-simmering tensions between tourists and Hawai‘i residents to the surface, spurring contentious conversations about land use, water supplies, and what many consider to be the state’s overreliance on tourism.
In spring 2020, shortly after Hawai‘i instituted one of the most comprehensive COVID-19 lockdowns in the U.S., a group of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) activists and leaders formed ‘Aina Aloha Economic Futures, a coalition aimed at advancing social, economic, and environmental policies rooted in traditional Hawaiian knowledge and the principles of a circular economy.
“We are all questioning the impacts of unfettered tourism on our islands’ natural resources and our quality of life,” wrote coalition cofounder Kamanamaikalani Beamer, a professor in the University of Hawai‘i’s Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, in a July 2021 op-ed. An extractive, linear economy “wasn’t working for most of us pre-COVID-19,” he wrote, “and it won’t be better in the future without…living wages for Hawai‘i’s people and caring for our precious ‘āina (land).” This past June, the coalition’s efforts resulted in the passage of new legislation designed to foster a less-resource-intensive travel industry in Hawai‘i.
Against this political backdrop, Kona Village represents a test case for a circular economy in Hawai‘i. The resort uses 100 percent solar energy and treats wastewater on-site. Guests ride bicycles to get around the resort, and the project avoided unnecessary material waste through a partnership with ReUse Hawaii, which carefully deconstructed each of Kona Village’s 100-plus bungalows and salvaged usable materials, ultimately recycling 80 percent of the resort’s buildings and infrastructure.
Graham Hart, a cofounder of the O’ahu-based Kokomo Studio and a scholar of midcentury architecture in Hawai‘i, said he hopes Kona Village “pushes other projects to take the same steps. I would love this to happen at Coco Palms”—a similarly beloved Kauai resort severely damaged by Hurricane Iniki in 1992. “I think it’s aesthetically the right thing to do, and in principle the right thing to do.”
Kona Village originally opened in 1965, the brainchild of Texas oilman John “Johno” Jackson and his wife, Helen, who together sought to re-create a slice of the varied Polynesian cultures and architecture they had experienced sailing throughout the South Pacific. The resort’s groupings of thatch-roofed, standalone bungalows were devoid of televisions, phones, and alarm clocks and stood in stark contrast to other resorts of the day, such as the Mauna Kea Resort Hotel, a soaring concrete monolith designed by SOM that same year.
In 2011, a tsunami triggered by Japan’s Tōhoku earthquake destroyed much of Kona Village. “It was a wasteland,” Warner recalled.
The deconstruction process, though time-consuming, was instructive for the architects: “The forensics of seeing what lasted and what didn’t was helpful,” Warner said. “Metal doesn’t do well on the coast, so whether it’s a nail or a bracket holding up framing, you think about the component parts—even how many light fixtures you need, because chances are, at some point, you’re going to have to replace them.”
Re-creating certain iconic elements of the original Kona Village was a requisite, both as an homage to the original architecture and as a practical necessity. The architects also worked with a cultural advisory committee made up of lineal descendants to protect sensitive or sacred sites, including 15 acres of petroglyphs that are now accessible via a winding wooden boardwalk.
In other, equally important ways, Kona Village’s architecture departs from the pan-Polynesian fantasyland of the original resort, taking its inspiration instead from Big Island vernacular architecture. Warner explained, “We found old photographs of Kahuwai [Bay]. We researched the pili grass. We went backward into the human history there and tried to acknowledge that.”
The result is a hybrid architecture, a cross between contemporary tropical design, regional vernacular, and retro kitsch. Roofs evocative of precolonial Hawaiian hale are thatched with “grass” made from recycled plastic. Elegant wood finishes coexist with screens of rough-hewn timbers. In the latter detail, Hart sees a direct connection between Kona Village and Warner’s alma mater, Hawai‘i Preparatory Academy, designed by Vladimir Ossipoff in 1967, which makes ample use of rugged, unfinished ‘ōhi’a posts. “You could call it an homage, a copy, a connection—but they’re pulling from so many different places that they’re making it their own,” he said.
The resurrection of Kona Village is something of a Rorschach test. Where some may see a new and necessary direction for Hawai‘i tourism—a more intimate and less extractive hospitality experience, guided by an ethic of environmental and cultural stewardship—others may see the perpetuation of architectural tropes that have long fueled a tourism industry more rooted in fantasy than historical fact, with disastrous results for Kānaka Maoli and other Pacific nations. Still others would argue that no resort, however sustainable, addresses the fundamental injustice of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. But with the state’s official pivot toward regenerative tourism, Kona Village may soon serve as a model for other hoteliers, an early example of a shift toward a less harmful form of hospitality.
Timothy A. Schuler writes about design and the environment from his home base of Manhattan, Kansas.
