For many, Maui’s remote nature is a primary part of the appeal to setting up residency on the island. But it does pose a challenge when it comes to construction. For a couple who splits time between Indonesia and Maui, San Francisco-based Spiegel Aihara Workshop (SAW) met the challenge of limited resources and labor with the Kauhikoa Core House, a “prefabrication hybrid.”
The structural concept starts with a standardized central core for a home’s most technically complex and traditionally expensive functions, such as bathrooms and mechanical equipment, and allows for different methodologies of prefabrication or conventional framing to be built around it, freeing up the rest of the structure to respond simply and directly to its context. The resulting residence is a two-bedroom home that appears as a tumbling set of forms settling gracefully into the landscape of its site, a former pineapple plantation.
Of the 812-square-foot, the 163-square-foot Core module, developed by SAW in collaboration with Dustin Stephens, holds the two bathrooms, kitchen sink and cabinetry wall, and mechanical systems; and is flanked by the two bedrooms on either side, centering the open kitchen and living spaces. The careful arrangement of domestic service functions within the core helps to choreograph and maximize open space and easy circulation throughout the rest of the home, and particularly allows for the distinct framing of the outdoor spaces as central to the couple’s lifestyle and supported by the Hawaiian climate.
“The super-compact Core programs each room, just by its adjacency. It carries the DNA of the functions of the adjoining space,” explains SAW Co-Founder Dan Spiegel. “There’s no need for anything in between – no hallways, no buffered transitions – just spaces of inhabitation, always embedded in the landscape on three sides.”
A striking, modularized screen system of rhythmically tapering pre-fabricated teak panels assembled in Bali, filters the strong eastern winds and morning sun, while providing a racking system for the implements of Hawaiian life: bicycles, surfboards, wetsuits, and beach chairs beside the outdoor shower, which is used as the primary shower. The roof overhang provides for the simple construction of multiple continuous lanais, connected across the common space, and allows for the lofted workspace in the primary bedroom (with a balcony to capture the view), a storage loft integrated into the top of the Core, and the private, intimate, and the fully separable guest suite towards the low end of the slope, shielding the southern sun. All indoor and outdoor furnishings, provided by the homeowners, were custom-made in Indonesia.
In the context of the landscape, the house perches towards the back corner of the lot against the densely forested edge of a gully, directing the primary living spaces outwards to views of the Pacific Ocean and Haleakala volcano in opposite directions, and opening up towards the sunset in the west. Its unique massing, the aforementioned tumbling set of forms, references the abstract movement of waves on the horizon.
“The landscape here is so dynamic,” describes SAW co-founder Megumi Aihara. Standing on the site, you can start to feel how the winds and waves carved and faceted the island from all directions. We felt it was important for the building to feel rooted, but also playfully engaging in this multi-directional transformation. The approach from the street suggests something unusual had settled there into the landscape. Then when you turn along the driveway, the building opens up to you and you see how it has come to deeply belong.”
One of the homeowners, an avid surfer with an intrepid mindset, served as the general contractor and constructed much of the work himself. Enthralled by the process of reading the Hawaiian landscape through collaboration and design, he is now pursuing a graduate architecture degree at the University of Hawaii.
Photography by Mariko Reed.
Like what you see? Get it first with a subscription to aspire design and home magazine.