Four Seasons Resort Lanai

Puʻu Pehe, the sea stack islanders call Sweetheart Rock, stands off the point at the end of Hulopoʻe Bay, and on many mornings spinner dolphins drift into the bay to rest. Four Seasons Resort Lanai sits on the terraces above, the only beachfront hotel on an island of about 3,000 people whose one town, Lanai City, lies twenty minutes up the hill.

History

James Dole bought Lanai in 1922 and turned it into the largest pineapple plantation in the world, and for most of the century the island lived on that single crop. As the plantation wound down, Castle & Cooke, then controlled by David Murdock, turned to tourism and built two hotels: The Lodge at Koele in the cool uplands in 1990, and the Manele Bay Hotel above the beach in 1991. The last pineapple harvest came in 1992. Four Seasons took over the management of both hotels in 2005. In 2012 Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, bought around 98 percent of the island, and the beach hotel closed for a rebuilding that reached every room. It reopened in early 2016 as Four Seasons Resort Lanai. The upland lodge followed in 2019 as Sensei Lanai, a Four Seasons Resort given over to wellness.

Architecture and design

The resort is a group of low wings set on terraces that step down towards the bay, arranged around courtyards with gardens, pools and running water. The rebuilding replaced the original interiors with lighter rooms in wood and stone, opened up the views to the sea, and filled the public spaces with Hawaiian and Asian art. Most rooms look over the bay or the gardens from their lanai, and the suites add living rooms and larger terraces.

Dining

Nobu Lanai is the island's branch of Nobu Matsuhisa's restaurants, in which Ellison is a partner, and it serves the group's Japanese cooking with Peruvian notes, using fish from Hawaiian waters. One Forty, named for the island's area of roughly 140 square miles, serves breakfast and steaks and seafood on a terrace above the bay. Malibu Farm, the restaurant founded by Helene Henderson in California, serves lunch by the pool.

Wellness

The spa occupies its own building near the pools, and the fitness centre and tennis courts sit nearby. Hulopoʻe Bay is a marine life conservation district, so the reef in front of the hotel is protected, and snorkellers share the water with turtles, reef fish and, at times, the dolphins. The Manele golf course, designed by Jack Nicklaus, runs along the cliffs beside the resort, with holes played across inlets of the sea.

Weddings and events

On 1 January 1994 Bill Gates married Melinda French on the Manele golf course, at the edge of the cliffs, and the clifftop is still among the settings used for ceremonies. Weddings also take place on the lawns above the bay and on the beach, and the resort has a ballroom and meeting rooms for conferences and private events.

Location

Lanai is the smallest inhabited Hawaiian island open to visitors, with no traffic lights and few paved roads. Lanai Airport, with short flights from Honolulu, is about 20 minutes from the hotel, and a passenger ferry crosses to Maui from Mānele Harbour, beside the resort. Inland, Lanai City keeps its plantation-era cottages and the tall Norfolk Island pines around Dole Park. Four-wheel-drive tracks lead to Keahiakawelo, the field of wind-shaped boulders known as the Garden of the Gods, and to Shipwreck Beach on the north shore, where a rusting wartime ship lies on the reef. As a resort on Lanai it has the island's main swimming beach almost to itself, and the island's whole pace sets the tone of a stay.