Halekulani

Every evening at dusk a hula dancer performs under a tree on the sand at the end of Lewers Street, with Diamond Head behind her and a trio playing Hawaiian standards. The spot is House Without A Key, the open-air bar of the Halekulani, Honolulu, and it has drawn Waikiki's residents and visitors since long before the high-rises arrived.

History

Robert Lewers, a Honolulu lumber merchant, built a beach house on this site and in 1907 began taking in guests under the name Hau Tree. In 1917 Clifford and Juliet Kimball leased the property and renamed it Halekulani, which translates as house befitting heaven. The Kimballs ran it as a cluster of bungalows and a main building, which was rebuilt in 1931 in the Hawaiian style with a sloping roof and deep verandas. In 1925 Earl Derr Biggers, a guest, published The House Without a Key, the first Charlie Chan mystery, named for the fact that the hotel's doors were never locked.

The Kimball family sold in 1962, and in 1981 the Japanese developer Mitsui Fudosan bought the hotel. It closed in 1983, and most of the old bungalows were demolished for a new complex of five buildings around the restored 1931 main house. The new Halekulani opened in 1984. It was renovated again in a long closure through 2019 and 2020, reopening in 2021. The company opened a sister hotel, Halepuna Waikiki, across Lewers Street in 2019.

Architecture and design

The 1984 rebuild was designed by Killingsworth, Brady & Associates of Long Beach, California, whose principal Edward Killingsworth had already built resorts for Mitsui elsewhere in the Pacific. Five interconnected buildings step back from the beach so that most rooms keep a view of the ocean, and the whole site is kept in white and shades of white, the hotel's signature. The main pool is floored with a mosaic of a Cattleya orchid made from about 1.2 million glass tiles. The 1931 main building houses the restaurants La Mer and Orchids, and its veranda overlooks the sand.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has 453 rooms and suites, almost all with lanais and ocean or Diamond Head views. The seven-shades-of-white interiors use marble, pale wood and local art. Suites on the upper floors of the main buildings include the Royal and Presidential suites and a set of club-level rooms with their own lounge.

Dining

La Mer is the formal French restaurant on the top floor of the 1931 building, one of the few in Hawaii to have held Forbes five-star status for decades. Orchids, below it, serves breakfast and lunch on the veranda and is known across Honolulu for its Sunday brunch. House Without A Key, on the sand, serves cocktails and a Hawaiian menu with live music and hula at sunset. L'Aperitif is the bar off the lobby, and the Veranda serves afternoon tea.

Wellness

SpaHalekulani occupies its own building with treatment rooms drawing on Hawaiian, Japanese and other Pacific traditions. There is a fitness centre and the orchid pool, with the beach, Waikiki's surf schools and catamarans directly in front.

Weddings and events

Halekulani has long been one of Honolulu's wedding addresses, with ceremonies on the lawn by the beach, the Hau Terrace by the sand and a ballroom for receptions, and it is popular with couples from Japan. The hotel's meeting rooms and ballroom handle conferences and corporate dinners, and La Mer and Orchids take private groups.

Location

The hotel stands at 2199 Kalia Road at the western end of Waikiki Beach, about 25 minutes from Daniel K. Inouye International Airport by car. The shops of Kalakaua Avenue are one block inland, and Diamond Head is a 20-minute drive along the coast. For a luxury hotel in Waikiki, its stretch of beach is among the quietest.