notes

We’ve had to cope with plenty in the trade in English antiques over the course of the last year, but the now-abating economic malaise which seemed an inexorable force of nature now pales compared to the plume of volcanic detritus making its way across western Europe. With all that, hope springs eternal that our brave European colleagues, Elliot Lee, Trinity House and a number of others make their way here. Who said the trade isn’t fraught with excitement?

From the natural environment of my last blog now back to the built environment, I have to say this most recent of our two-score return trips to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was not without some trepidation. I’ll readily grant, the place was formerly more than somewhat dowdy, albeit in excellent repair, and it reminded me of going into my grandmother’s living room. Familiar, comfortable, shabby from long use, with anything inconvenient long-since gotten used to. And, everything within eyesight fraught with sentiment. I daresay, the design team involved with last year’s refit, doubtless aware that my sentiments matched those of many, many others, must have approached this project with a considerable degree of, shall we say, anxiety.

It was, then, with profound relief we discovered the masterful job Honolulu-based interior designers Philpotts & Associates performed. Actually, I should stress the ‘masterful’, because the designer was able to coordinate older, ineffectively wrought design elements- like the linking colonnade- and render them attractive and integral.
Along those lines, common areas of the hotel seldom used, like the Diamond Head portico with its vista on lawn and planting beds of cannas and torch ginger in Royal Hawaiian pink, are now welcoming- and used!
The refit has substantially altered the ground floor layout of the hotel, with a number of later accretions- small office and conference areas and function rooms- removed, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find restoring the ground floor to something closer to its original footprint. Frankly, I was a bit concerned about the fate of the lower lobby, with its vestiges of a long-ago scheme realized by Frances Elkins. But, of course, vestigial is all it formerly was because Elkins’ original design with comfortable seating and conversation areas had given way over the years to the lobby becoming little more than an inordinately wide hallway, with what little furniture the space contained all shoved along one wall. Here, again, the adjacent small Lurline room, a function room that was hardly larger than a closet, was removed allowing from the lower lobby a through vista to the beach.

Effectively updating the venerable always begs the cliché the best of the old and the new. Despite the prominent use of koa wood pieces of traditional motif.  I’d have to say that the design for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is quite new, by which I mean though it has a quality of mimesis to render it intellectually comfortable it is distinctive and speaks for itself- and not just in the accents of an earlier day. And yet it seems to have always been there, as the design articulates perfectly with the corpus of the hotel, its surrounding gardens, and the beach.

If you’ve traveled to Hawaii at any time during the past 30 years, you’ll know that you’re obliged to complete a declaration form for the State of Hawaii Department of Agriculture, certifying you are not carrying any contraband of the flora or fauna variety. The reverse of the form is a survey from the Department of Tourism for visitors and returning residents, detailing length and purpose of stay. Frankly, I’ve nearly memorized this form, as it is unchanged since I first visited in 1976. I must feature myself an erstwhile kama’aina, as I’m pleased to tick the last box in the field ‘Number of visits to Hawaii’, at more than 20.

Even so, we never get to do as much on our visits as we’d like. Although not sluggards, we do enjoy daily beach time- two or three hours- and the occasional movie, and this eats considerably into what we’ve got at our disposal. With all that, even in the concrete and asphalt maze that represents so much of Waikiki, we still are surprised by what we see and this late trip more so than before. Keith and I both love birds and tropical foliage and, not surprising, one finds both together. For the first time ever, I saw an amakihi amidst the torch ginger in the garden of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. This diminutive honey creeper with the curved beak and breast feathers the color of Dijon mustard was a surprising site. The rarity of the honey creepers is a given, and my presumption always is that something rare should be somewhere remote. Had we been on a nature hike above the Manoa Valley, we would have been no less delighted but a little less surprised to see this tiny bird.

By the same token, we were surprised to see on several occasions elepai’o, perhaps a little less elusive, on walks we had taken through Kapiolani Park. For years, ‘Elepaio’ hadn’t been much for me more than the name of a street I used as a shortcut to Kahala Avenue and back to Waikiki.

Mind you, neither of these bird species are particularly common, and they are both very, very small. The elepai’o is hardly as large as a half-dollar coin. Still and all, that we saw them on this trip, without making any particular effort was, in my view significant. My initial reflection was that, given the fewer numbers of tourists, human activity was both not impeding the birds’ natural range, or limiting their ability to access areas the presence of so many people would ordinarily cause them to avoid. Too, residential and commercial development has ground to a halt and with it habitat destruction.

Moreover, there might be something a bit more broadly systemic at work, too, and I say this with the full realization that the collective consciousness of the human species is possessed of sufficient ego that it has historically removed itself as a component of any natural earthly system. But hope springs eternal, as the poet says, and perhaps those in Hawaii and elsewhere who’ve wisely counseled linking our consciousness with that of the larger natural world are finally achieving some effect. I hope the small birds we were delighted to see represent a physical manifestation of a spiritual move in the right direction.

The great and the good may wax eloquent about Maui no ka oi, or the glories of Hualalai on the North Kona coast, but for us, the quintessential vacation is a week in Honolulu at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, in the midst of Waikiki. No argument, the approach is via the expanse of high rise condo and hotel developments that line miles and miles of Ala Moana Boulevard and then Kalakaua, but once on the beach, with the infinite Pacific in front of you, and the outline of Diamond Head beside you- well, the composite makes for something iconic that could be dissembled, but why? We love it, and for us of course, that’s sufficient. For over 20 years, we’ve made Honolulu, and usually the Royal Hawaiian an annual, sometimes twice annual, pilgrimage site. As times being the way they were in 2009, we gave Honolulu, and indeed any sort of time off, a miss. Consequently, our break last week we enjoyed inordinately- once we got into it. That’s a problem for us, as for most people, I think- the necessary break in routine takes a few days to take effect, and, really, despite the week’s length, the first two don’t count. I suppose they do count, though, being an essential segue between keyed up, and relaxed.

Relaxed, yes, but brains not entirely gelatinous, we were keen to take the measure of Honolulu, given how dependent the entire state of Hawaii is on tourism. We presumed that as the state’s capital and commercial centre, any dearth of tourist dollars would manifest itself there, and we were on the lookout. We aren’t disaster groupies, but our fondness for the place makes us realize it can’t exist as a time warp, and requires a certain amount of change as evidence of vitality. But not too much. Indeed, our own interests in the Hawaiian natural ecology seems to match an increasing trend in the larger world. As a younger man, it seemed that the Hawaiian landscape was more properly to serve as an exotic backdrop for mainstream western culture. Now in my sixth decade, the natural world increasing informs my consciousness and feeds my spirit- or perhaps it always did, just that now I’m sufficiently meditative to hear what the world is actually saying. Age is magically and happily compensatory, isn’t it? What one loses in strength and pulchritude, one gains in wisdom and spirit. More than compensatory- for there is nothing that I’ve lost in physical vitality that I would trade even one scintilla of wisdom to regain.

Certainly in Waikiki, the small numbers of tourists was noticeable, even outright startling. We were told by visitors transiting through that in the neighbor islands the dearth of tourists was even more apparent. While not exactly a ghost town, we did see a number of building works, some of considerable size, that had come to a halt- not slowed, but stopped, including a massive residential and commercial complex in the Ward Estate, just behind Val Ossipoff’s timelessly rendered IBM Building. When the larger adjacent, and now mothballed, structure is complete, if it ever is, it will visually engulf the entire vista along this particular stretch of Ala Moana. The scale of the building is so inappropriately large it can only be described as decadent. The use of the term ‘decadent’ to describe any building always puts me in mind of the first use I had ever heard, to describe the overblown baths of Caracalla in Rome as a hallmark of the decadence of Roman architecture. One can only hope, then, that this decadent structure, if it isn’t razed, represents the final end of the line. More tomorrow…

It is gratifying to find that there really is a generational change occurring amongst buyers of artwork and English antiques. I know that our own experience is at best anecdotal, but it is a clearly demonstrable phenomenon for Chappell & McCullar this year. We have enjoyed visits with a number of younger collectors that we’ve welcomed children in tow, and sent them out with something to try out, wrapped snugly in the back of the SUV along with the stuffed animals. Mercifully, most of these sales have stuck.

It must be something in the air- some bucolic aroma I guess that has displaced the miasma of last year- as age is not the only common feature. Young, starting a family, and purchasing a new, family-size house are features they all seem to share. Mind you, most of these are sales that have resulted following, shall we say, protracted pricing discussions. That said, we all want to preserve our cash so that someone wants a bit extra is understandable. If someone feels as though they’ve made a purchase at a good price, they will further be favorably disposed to continue to grace us with their custom. That’s fine by me. Keith and I would like to have the opportunity to make a sale or two next year, as well.