How the upper class lived
Fran Dibble explores the house Doris built.
Escaping the bubble of Waikiki Beach in Honolulu is essential, if just to realise the entire island isn’t just tat and jangle. It can be a mission though. Driving is not something you might want to take on and the 20-minute taxi ride with a patient cabbie queuing through traffic is not simple – who on earth puts their museums and major art galleries so far from the central tourist watering hole?
You start to wonder just what you will encounter, but the Honolulu Museum of Art is most impressive.
Founded by Anna Cooke, the daughter of missionaries, it was originally for her ‘‘parlour pieces’’ that had outgrown her own parlour.
It employs a series of rooms that make use of local materials, such as cut lava; coral floors; and Chinese granite, originally arriving as ballast on ships when trading with Hawaiian sandalwood.
It has a low-slung pitched roof – appearing more Japanese than Pacific – and generous courtyards themed as Mediterranean, Chinese and Pacific. All up, it’s an East meets West handled with a great deal of sensitivity.
And the collection staggers, remembering it’s not always the case that impressive buildings hold impressive contents – Whistlers, Monet, early American portraits, Van Gogh and Impressionists – who would have thought? Perhaps warm weather makes for enthusiastic benefactors who donate.
But this review is on a more unusual experience – a tour the art museum runs to the house of Doris Duke. She was the heiress of the Duke family, her father making his money from tobacco. The vast fortunes came to her surprisingly early at the age of 12.
She grew up as the ‘‘billiondollar baby’’, a celebrity followed and watched, marrying in 1935 and embarking on a honeymoon world trip. The last stop was in Honolulu, before she returned to Florida where she and her husband were to start building a house.
Duke was moved by the art she saw in her travels, particularly the Islamic art she encountered in India, Turkey and Iraq, leading her, on tour, to commission the marble work for a bathroom.
Hawaii had captivated her. She enjoyed swimming, boating and the seclusion the island offered. So, she bought a block of land behind Diamond Head and re-directed transport of the bathroom.
This was the beginning of a project that was never finished, even at her death in 1993. The house became a retreat, her private Shangri La, which she ordered as she pleased.
The form the house takes is a modified Islamic structure. The outside is extremely plain, down a long, fenced driveway unseen from the road, with formal entry courtyards and small water fountains.
Ceilings are elaborately carved and geometric tiling is mounted on the walls, although, curiously, they are often configured in separate square sections as if a gallery of European paintings hung side by side.
What Duke couldn’t obtain by buying directly or from notable collections that came up for sale in New York – many items from the Hearst family sale made their way here – she got custom made either from artisans in Baghdad, Iraq, or from local makers on the island – a new process for many who learnt to cut marble sections for flooring Duke had designed.
It is mixed and meshed, involving some 3500 objects, with almost all of it on display. And most are used with architectural function, for instance, as door frames and fireplace surrounds.
It’s an interesting experience visiting the house.
The extreme wealth of the American upper class produced an interest in the exotic, but Duke’s lavishness does have a casual quality separating it from some of that pretension.