Ossipoff Cabins

On a rarely visited ridge on O‘ahu are the little-known cabins built by Hawai‘i’s most famous architect, Vladimir Ossipoff. Pālehua is an hour’s drive west from Honolulu, half of it climbing steeply up a ridge to 2,500 feet, where the heat and the smell of asphalt give way to the cool air and bracing scent of eucalyptus. Entering the main cabin, you suddenly feel as though you’re hovering over the edge of the mountain, the Wai‘anae range and the entire Leeward coastline unfolding before you.

Ossipoff built the first cabin in the early 1950s as a weekend retreat for his family, and a second, smaller one about five years later for close friends. They are among the few projects still standing that he designed and built for himself. The cabins were “his test bed, his sketchpad,” says architect Graham Hart. Compact and minimalist, their layout parallels the prevailing trade winds. The details—rough-hewn strawberry guava and eucalyptus wood posts, screened sliding walls, narrow strips of window at eye level—illustrate some of Ossipoff’s signature design principles: the integration of inside with outside, the contrasting shadows and light, the organic relationship to the site. The understated cabins seem only to lead the eye to the expansiveness beyond. “It’s hard to describe objectively,” says Valerie Ossipoff, Vladimir’s daughter, of her time there, “because it was a feeling place. You just came and you were quiet. It was never noisy, ever.”

After Ossipoff relinquished his lease and left the cabins in the 1970s, they fell into disrepair. Then in 2009 the Gill family acquired nearly 1,600 acres at Pālehua from the Campbell Estate, with the goal of cultural and environmental conservation; about five years ago they began restoring the cabins based on archival photos from the ’60s, enlisting craftspeople to sand down the cabins’ unfinished wood and create a facsimile of the original, from the hand-cut lampshades to the Mid-Century Modern furniture. The family is making the cabins available to those who invest time doing conservation work in the Wai‘anae mountains. Gary Gill hopes that when people step into the cabins, they will come to appreciate what Ossipoff understood: how unique Hawai‘i’s environment is, he says, “how precious and how it needs our time and attention to protect it.”

palehua.org

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First published in Hana Hou