KOHANAIKI CLUBHOUSE | ‘Primitive Hut’ is what I had in mind when designing the Clubhouse for Kohanaiki. A simple open indoor/outdoor building where the air can blow though and the views open wide to the horizon of the Pacific. The architecture is clean, balanced and unadorned. It’s beauty is felt in the materials, balance and proportion. The architecture is calm and frames the rugged natural beauty of the Kona cost.

Now, the offered activities at Kohanaiki Clubhouse are very inclusive, so we had to use several ‘huts’ to make a Clubhouse Village. Each of the individual buildings has it’s own simple roof form, arranged carefully to make a village plan. I think of it not as a building with a landscape around it but as many smaller and more intimate buildings place within a landscape. One walks through the landscape to get from place to place.

The site for the Clubhouse is unique. It is placed high up on a plinth, like the acropolis. Or as I like to think of it, it is like the national historic site of Puʻukoholā Heiau (Temple on the Hill of the Whale), located just up the Queens Highway near Kawaihae and built by King Kamehameha. This was a massive stone plinth on top of which a temple was placed. The stone plinth still stands today.

It is the assemble of these simple timeless Hawaiian elements such as Hut and Stone Plinth together with Fire and Water that give this Clubhouse Village meaning and belonging on this beautiful Kona coast.