When Home is a House in Hawaii
By: Natalie Brown
Tags: Childhood, Housing, Hawaii, Interview, Home

How does having an exotic childhood in a distant place impact one’s long-term sense of home and belonging? Is it a source of security and identity? A past that seems far away and out of reach? In this interview, Mary discusses growing up in a unique house in Honolulu, HI during the 1960s and 1970s and what it means to feel “at home” now that she and her children live on the mainland.

Patio (Photo used with permission)

You grew up in an architecturally unique house in Honolulu, HI. What was it like?

It was a beautiful home designed by the same person who did the Arizona Memorial. It was shaped like a boat in that it had projecting angles that came off the house. It was built right into the landscape, so much of the exterior space and interior space blended. Because it was built on the base of a mountain, you would walk up some steep steps to the main level of the house. When you got there, it opened into a patio that had no walls.

On one side of the patio was the living room, living quarters and family rooms. Those had glass walls that would pull right into the house so that the breezes could blow through. If you turned the other direction, you would look out over the lower yard. It was a large patio space that had a guardrail and seating, and an outside fireplace that linked to the inside fireplace in the living room. Turn again and you could walk out into the upper yard.

That open patio space separated the main part of the house from the kitchen, dining room, and breakfast rooms. From the patio you could look out over the entire city of Honolulu from Diamond Head all the way to Punchbowl and to the ocean beyond. It was beautiful to watch the sunsets, the light, the storms. It just spread out before you.

It was fun to have fires in the evening, because Hawaii rains on many nights. One of my favorite things was to see the rain come pouring down all around me while sitting on a couch wrapped in a blanket. It was really an open house, which was Hawaiian style. I loved it.

How has your childhood home impacted your feelings about houses?

I’ve always liked houses with lots of windows. I think it’s important for peace and for light to have big windows — and for dreaming. I love seeing the rain pound down on windows.

What was your neighborhood like?

It was a nice neighborhood. The houses were each set in gardens, maybe a 1/4 acre to a 1/2 acre. So it was a city, but also heavily treed with many wonderful smelling flowers — plumeria, ginger and hibiscus, lichee, fig, and papaya trees. We had big banyan trees on our street, so the kids would all play in the banyan trees. They are like giant jungle gyms.

The neighborhood was very diverse. To our left was a Chinese family; to our right a Japanese family. And below us a Caucasian family. We lived on a mountain at the end of a cul-de-sac, so there was quite a topography in which we could go up and down hills with our bikes and mini-motorcycles. We’d ride them up and down our neighbors’ driveways, and no one seemed to mind. We’d play kick-the-can with all the different kids in the neighborhood. It really was a fun neighborhood to grow up in.

Where did you and your neighbors attend school?

I went to a private school, Punahou. A lot of people lived in that neighborhood because it was close to Punahou. My dad went to Punahou, and most of his friends had gone to Punahou, so all their kids went to Punahou. It was just a thing to do. That was normality.

I made all my friends at school. Even when I was playing tennis competitively, your close friends were teammates or your school friends. Same with other kids at different schools. Play was much less “organized” and more neighborhood than it seems to be today.

Living room and den with views over Honolulu (Photo used with permission)

Where did household goods and food come from at that time in Hawaii?

My parents decorated our house with simple woods, lauhala or oriental carpets and light furniture. Things would usually come in on ships. As jets developed, some of the more exotic things came in and became fresher. But for a while it was mostly local.

We had a lot of oriental foods. McDonald’s didn’t exist. Bagels were unheard of. So we ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. And SPAM. SPAM was icky, but my dad liked it. My mom did a lot with rice. She was a very good cook. She didn’t do a lot of fancy things. She just did very good things. She’d make homemade bread, chicken — shoyu chicken — she made wonderful things. And a real treat was when the Portuguese Sweet Bread man would come selling loaves of bread from his truck.