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In the early ’90s, my family began going to a resort on the northwest coast of the Big Island of Hawaii. This wasn’t a likely destination; we lived in Boston at the time, where people went to Florida or the Caribbean when they wanted to thaw. But my father, as he recalls it, had seen an ad in the back pages of The New Yorker, and something about the image—not much bigger than a postage stamp, but promising an expansive world beyond—appealed to him from the snow-bound northeast.
The journey was long. My parents bought us our first Game Boy to occupy us on the flight, and when the plane finally descended over the scorched lava fields surrounding the airport at Keāhole, my father was struck by nerves: What was this forsaken landscape? There were no walls to the homely airport—there still aren’t—and you could feel your brittle winter bones warming as soon as you stepped off the plane. In those days, people used white coral stones to spell out messages against the dark-as-onyx lava, and these inscriptions flanked the highway that led us to the resort. Wild donkeys were just about the only creatures other than us who seemed to be roaming about; we might have been on the dark side of the moon. But when we finally arrived at Kona Village, the entrance flanked by burning tiki lamps, my parents were given rum punch and my brother and I were handed little cups of guava and passion fruit juice. We didn’t know exactly what it was, only that we had never tasted anything like it.
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Can you fall in love with a place over the course of a week? What happened during that first visit and on the subsequent trips was something like a love affair. But of course we loved it: It was as close to literal paradise as you could get. It had been envisioned as such by John “Johno” Jackson, an oil executive from California who, when he happened upon Kahuwai Bay while sailing his boat along the Kona coastline in the early 1960s, declared: “This is where I will build my village”—or so the story goes. (There’s a lot of lore attached to this place.) Of course, he was not the first to recognize the special beauty of the place; it had been a fishing village since about 1000 AD, when it was settled by the Polynesians. The last native inhabitant left only in 1939.
When Jackson opened his resort in 1963, there were 50 hales—freestanding huts, thatched with ti leaves—that made up the guest quarters. Over the years the number would grow. Many of them were perched on stilts over the lava cliffs; deeper in the resort, they hovered above the lagoon, a traditional fishing hole that had been converted into an amoeba-shaped pond where black swans did lazy laps and peacocks strutted the perimeter. Each cluster of hales was like a little neighborhood within the larger village, the raw energy of the lava offering a different energy from the lazy groove of the pond.
A salt-and-pepper beach (a mixture of blond sand and ground-down lava) was where my family spent many of our days, the surf just energetic enough to excite my brother and I, but not strong enough to pose any real danger. Breakfast was a buffet that seemed to tower several feet above my head; a mountain of tropical fruits and pastries, some baked with taro so that they took on a violet hue. My parents spent what seemed like hours facedown in the ocean, snorkeling among the canary yellow tang and leatherback turtles who would pass them with what my father once described as “that disdainful look of aged professors.” My brother and I were tended to by the “aunties” who ran the keiki (kids) program and taught us how to weave bracelets from those same skinny, long leaves that thatched our rooms.
There were no televisions or phones in the rooms, which, especially then, when smartphones were on no one’s radar, offered a radical shift from the rhythms of normal life. There was an office phone for emergencies, but the absence of communication made you wonder what could be so important in the first place. We went back seven more times; in college, when I had already begun taking trips on my own and with friends, I dropped everything to go back with my parents.
On March 11, 2011, an earthquake off the northeastern coast of Honshu in Japan sent a series of powerfully destructive tsunamis radiating across the globe. The waves struck land several thousand miles away, including the Kona coastline. Images of its aftermath show collapsed roofs and doors hanging from their hinges, lonely palm trees swaying amid the devastation. Overnight, the resort took on a haunted look, like a place that had been abandoned for years. Employees from all parts of the resort became cleanup crews, but there wasn’t much hope. The resort was shuttered indefinitely. There was a fundraiser for employees who were suddenly out of a job that raised $250,000; half of that from members of a Facebook group made up of former guests calling itself “Save Kona Village” that had launched just eight days after the tsunami. Nostalgia is usually a gradual, seeping process; for the people who had loved this place, this was a sudden, shocking plunge.
The destruction of a luxury resort is not a tragedy. But it did mark an abrupt end to something my family and many others had loved, and a dramatic change for its employees, many of whom had worked there for decades. My parents, not quite willing to give up on the dream of Kahuwai Bay, visited a Four Seasons, which has a property down the beach and had, amazingly, been able to open again. They swam along the coast to catch a glimpse of the ruined landscape but encountered little more than a few desolate yellow tang, those bright fish who had kept them company on their happier snorkeling expeditions.
And then in 2016, it was announced that global real estate company Kennedy Wilson, whose CEO William J. McMorrow had honeymooned at Kona Village in 1992, would purchase the property—or, rather, lease it from the local trust, Kamehameha Schools, that owns the land—and develop it with Rosewood Hotels Resorts, a company with a track record in reinventing storied properties (like New York’s Carlyle Hotel). A cultural committee composed of lineal descendants of the original village would guide the renovation; former employees were consulted as well.
Every so often I would read about the progress, and then finally, last fall, there was a date: The (new) Kona Village, a Rosewood Resort was set to open in July this year. I probably received about 200 emails from PR companies a day. (It’s not a brag; it’s torture.) I responded within minutes to this one. About 10 months later, I was on a flight to Kona, remembering my very first approach as the plane descended onto the lava fields once again. Tufts of beige grass poked from the dark surface of the land, like rogue patches of hair on an elephant’s wrinkled back.
As I arrived at the property—just a few days after it officially opened to guests—a sense of muscle memory took hold. Rosewood has maintained the basic orientation of the original resort, with the hales spreading north and south along the coast, while the more elevated of the property’s two restaurants, Moana, had been recreated to echo the architectural profile of the building that previously stood in its place. But they have also added a set of rooms that face the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, oriented toward the sunrise and looking back along the lavascape. (Hawaii-raised architect Greg Warner of Walker Warner Architects oversaw the design.)
There are now also more varieties of rooms, including a four-bedroom suite that has its own private pool and comes with butler services that mean you might never need to leave—it is stunning and extravagant, if somewhat antithetical to the homey spirit of the original place. Over the years, the old Kona Village had added an exercise space and possibly a spa, but neither compared to the state-of-the-art fitness center now on offer or the Asaya spa, with its menu of thoughtful treatments drawing from the nature surrounding it. With all these upgrades comes a sharp uptick in the cost, even when adjusted (by my approximation) for inflation. The starting room rate is now $2,500 a night. (The cost of building this essentially new resort, which was done with particular attention to the environment, was about 1.5 times the typical cost of such a product, Radha Arora, the president and co-chief development officer of Rosewood told me.) It’s a luxury resort in every sense.
Up early the morning after I arrived thanks to my internal New York clock, I watched the sky turn from a shade of silvery gray to an iridescent opal, with pink clouds stretched like cotton candy across them. I ate breakfast at Moana: a skillet filled with taro root, sweet potatoes, softened kale, with a poached egg nestled in its salt-sweet bed of tubers, and looked out over a spit of lava where I remembered a manta ray used to circulate, making nightly rounds like a proctor accounting for his charges. (My driver from the airport had told me that some 300 manta rays live in Kahuwai Bay and that the fishermen can identify them by their distinctive markings.) The waitresses hovered sweetly as I ate my solo meal and brought me a book. “You don’t have to read it,” she said softly. “But just in case.” As I ate, a sudden rainstorm turned the ocean into a sheet of aluminum, roiling and dimpled at the same time. The plumeria shook in the trees, their yellow hearts playing peekaboo as the blossoms ducked and shuddered in the storm.
If you change the structure of something do you change its spiritual foundations as well? I was eating my breakfast in a sleeker setting, but the waitress was treating me as ohana, the Hawaiian word for family, making sure I had something to keep me company. All the employees, many of whom had been brought in from other locations around the globe, expressed that they had never been involved in something quite like this before, with all the attendant expectations brought by the “legacy” guests, but also the lineal descendants and other people who had a longstanding connection to the land. The sense of kuleana, or responsibility, was strong. The week before the resort opened, as part of a handoff ceremony, one of the lineal descendants collected water from the spot where the freshwater flows from its underground channel in the lava into the ocean, then mixed it into a drink shared by the descendants and the resort’s managers.
And yet, for all of the attention that Rosewood has paid to the spiritual, structural, and cultural underpinnings of Kona, it has changed the fundamental framework. It’s had to, and not just because of the destruction of the tsunami. The old Kona existed at a time when “sustainability” was not part of the vernacular. It ran on diesel generators. (A former employee told me a story about her uncle, on the engineering team among the early staff, who kept a defective generator going by hooking its gears up to a jeep.) The new Kona is powered entirely by solar energy; as soon as the surrounding municipality can handle it, it will give energy back to the grid. That towering buffet from years past that was such a spectacle almost certainly contributed to a good deal of waste. The new Kona, already LEED certified, has a full-time sustainability manager, Lauren Nakoa, who has been known, she told me, to audit the trash to make sure employees are recycling properly. (She currently sends the food scraps to local pigs but has her eye on an industrial composter that will create fertilizer for the on-site garden.)
On a scorching day, I met Rolinda “Kumu Welu” Bean, a resort employee whose connection to Kona Village is deep; her uncle was on the staff in the resorts’ first days, and she used to perform in the luaus that were held at the resort. (As a child, she even appeared in the pages of Vogue, an extra for a shoot by David Bailey featuring Penelope Tree and Jean Shrimpton.) Now she is the cultural manager, with headquarters in a center situated at the back of the resort, adjacent to a lava field that contains hundreds of petroglyphs, or ancient carvings in the rock—some perhaps 900 years old—that is now fully open and accessible to the public. (All beaches in Hawaii are open to the public, as well, and Kona Village’s are no exception.)
Before we enter the site, Rolinda chants in Hawaiian. It only lasts a moment but it reminds me that while this might technically be part of the United States, it is also a land entirely of its own. She shows me the etchings of sails, stick figures, and the checker-board-like square, and tells me the story of how literacy came to the islands. A former high school history teacher, she has a warm and engaging conversational style, and it’s easy to see how guests might be charmed into a seminar with her when they thought they were going to spend a day working on their tan.
For those who might want to combine history with a bit of sunbathing, there are a host of water activities also grounded in the history of the region and led by people with a real passion for the water. That evening a man named Mike Field takes me out on a boat that I’ve been eyeing for days as it lay beached on the shore. It looks like a large canoe, except with small outriggers on either side with a kind of hammock between them and a sail in the center. It’s a Hawaiian canoe, or wa a, and sailing on it involves instructing passengers to vault from side to side—or so Mike tells me and my companion as he has us hopping back and forth, ducking the mast so as not to knock ourselves out.
Mike’s position in the Kona Village ecosystem is a little hard to explain—an extended member of the ohana who seems to know everyone. (At the end of our sail he hands me the hat off his own head; a Kona Village emblazoned trucker-style cap that wouldn’t look out of place on the streets of Williamsburg, and that he designed himself.) As we sail across the bay the wind does something strange: It stops almost completely, so we are at a standstill, floating on the aqua waters, bobbing up and down. This is the place to swim, Mike tells me peering down at the crystal water, but we are two mai tais to the wind—so we sit, content, to let nature tell us what to do.
Booking details for Kona Village, a Rosewood Resort:
