A Dwelling for Dreamers

A happy marriage of genius and indulgence . . .this work of art is a $3 million home that belongs to Mama's owners, Floyd and Doris Christenson.

 

Rita Goldman

 

Say what you will about Michelangelo; it took the purse strings of a pope to transform the Sistine Chapel into a work of art. Mike had the talent—but who would have known, if an obliging patron hadn’t paid for the scaffolding and paint?
           
A similar happy marriage of genius and indulgence (albeit on a humbler and secular scale) exists in the little North Shore community of Ku‘au, next door to Mama’s Fish House. This work of art is a $3 million home that belongs to Mama’s owners, Floyd and Doris Christenson. Its design . . . well, that belongs to Bill Kohl, the carpenter the Christensons hired 25 years ago and have kept busily employed ever since.
           
Our story begins a quarter of a century before that, when Doris was a 17-year-old slip of a girl who had just married the man of her dreams. Floyd was 20, working on anti-missile missiles for a company in San Diego, top-secret clearance and all.
           
“I had a degree in psychology,” he says. “They hired me because I could write a coherent paragraph. Here I was, 20 years old, wondering if I was going to spend the rest of my life stuck in a windowless cubicle.”
           
He wasn’t alone. In the bland, buttoned-down ’50s, a lot of people were reading books like Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, and fantasizing about sailing off to a
tropical island.
           
Floyd and Doris did.
           
They were living on a 38-foot ketch they’d bought shortly after their marriage. The year son Keith turned three, the Christensons weighed anchor. For four lovely years, they island-hopped throughout the Marquesas and French Polynesia, sailing as far as New Zealand. Daughter Karen was born in Tahiti, and took her first footsteps at sea.
           
“It was a romance,” says Floyd, “and we were dreamers.”
           
By 1963, practical matters intervened. The kids were getting older; it was time to settle down. The Christensons sailed to Maui, sold the boat, and put the kids in school. Doris and Floyd joined the Lahaina Yacht Club as founding members.
           
“We were a motley group,” Floyd recalls, “more of an anti-yacht club, but we had a thousand members.”
           
In 1963, Lahaina was experiencing a renaissance of the kind that had made it so notorious a port of call, back in whaling’s heyday.
           
“Sailors would come ashore to ‘meet the locals,’” Floyd grins. “I would be in the bar, under the table. Chairs would be flying. The police would call to ask if the fight was over yet, and I’d say, ‘No, better wait a while.’”
           
At Doris’s suggestion—“She said she’d leave if I didn’t get a paying job”—Floyd got himself hired as the yacht club’s business manager. For a decade, he and Doris ran the restaurant and bar, not realizing they were in training.
           
Then one day in 1973, Floyd got a call from an acquaintance whose gambling debts had graduated from serious to “or else.” The fellow owned a couple of beachfront lots in Ku‘au that he needed to sell right away. A rundown shack on the property served as a local restaurant. “There were punch-outs there every Saturday night,” Doris recalls. “But our friend Hilda Costa was a good cook. She said, ‘You buy the restaurant, and I’ll run it.’”
           
The owner wanted $125,000. “I told him all I had on hand was $12,000,” says Floyd. “He said ‘Fine. Get it here by 5 p.m.’”
           
Over a handshake, the Christensons acquired the property that would become Mama’s Fish House. “Hilda came up with the name,” says Doris. Hilda was also the model for the illustration that became the restaurant’s logo: a comely island woman with a spear in one hand, a string of fish in the other.
           
In those days, Pa‘ia was a rough-and-tumble neighborhood separated from West Maui, the center of tourism, by miles of bad road. Friends of the Christensons tactfully suggested that Doris and Floyd had gone ‘round the bend when they agreed to purchase the property. The couple’s decision to open a fish house only confirmed the opinion that they were nuts. Fish was what local folks ate at home. Dining out meant going to a steak house.
           
“But tourists would ask about Hawaiian fish,” says Floyd, “and we were the only ones who had it.”
           
Floyd started printing a daily menu complete with the names of the fishermen who brought in the day’s catch, and where it had been caught. The practice became signature proof of the freshness of Mama’s fish, and earned the appreciation of the local community—and their referrals.
           
“We made it because of the locals,” says Floyd.
       
Even their obscure location became less of a handicap as repeat visitors ventured farther from West Maui’s resorts to explore the rest of the island. As Mama’s reputation grew, so did the need to expand. In 1979, Floyd and Doris hired a young carpenter named Bill Kohl. It was, as Bogey would say, the start of a beautiful friendship. Bill provided imagination, design and craftsmanship. The Christensons signed the checks and gave their Michelangelo free rein—insisting only that Mama’s retain the romance of the
South Pacific.
           
“Floyd and Doris put every nickel and dime into the restaurant,” says Bill. “It had been a funky old beach shack run by ex-hippies. There were only four palm trees on the property when we started. We hauled in a hundred more.”
           
When a local woodworker needed to sell his lumber inventory, he gave Floyd a sweet deal on rosewood, eucalyptus, koa, mango, monkey pod and other tropical woods, all of which were incorporated into the expanding restaurant. “We sawed and milled all the wood ourselves,” says Floyd.
           
For Bill Kohl, being hired by the Christensons was like being handed the keys to the candy store. He had earned an associate degree in architecture from a New York community college, “but I didn’t like school. All my life I would build stuff.”
           
Bill did most of the initial renovations himself, from carpentry to jackhammering the floors and laying tile. “I know all the crafts,” he says. “If you can’t use the tools, you can’t design. But my talent is figuring things out and running the crews.”
           
It was Bill who designed and engineered the restaurant’s lanai: ten wall sections made of koa and teak, trimmed in blue-gum eucalyptus. Hoisted in by crane and set in place over invisible concrete troughs, the walls are open at waist height to take in the view and the breeze wafting from the ocean steps away. Late afternoons, when the sun comes in low over the sea, a switch pulls down green-and-white-striped awnings. At night or in inclement weather, another switch activates pulleys and gears to raise large panes of glass hidden within the walls.
           
Bill never forgets how lucky he is to be given such freedom to create, such trust from the people who pay his way. Or that they share his vision of the restaurant as a work forever in progress. Mama’s employs several carpenters and cabinetmakers on a steady basis (“We’ve gone through every wall of the restaurant at least once or twice,” says Bill); half-a-dozen landscapers; and about 20 artisans from Hawai‘i, Tonga and elsewhere in the Pacific, who create works of tapa and carved wood—original artifacts that capture the ambiance of a tropical island.
           
“The restaurant is a living thing,” Bill explains. “We try to keep the experience fresh, so that people want to come back.”
           
Kohl and the Christensons are also preserving a way of life that elsewhere has passed into history. They salvaged building materials from sugar mills and plantation camps that were being shut down and dismantled. A tin awning over one of the restaurant’s bars came from a sugar mill built in the 1800s in nearby Hamakuapoko. Wood-framed windows were rescued from Pu‘unene camp houses just ahead of the bulldozers. A trypot once used on a whaling ship to render blubber now sits as a feature on the lawn. Near the parking lot, basketmaker Susan Kilmer has woven driftwood, netting and other flotsam into an entry arbor . . . beyond which, a walkway is bordered by chains that used to pull a conveyor belt at the Pa‘ia Sugar Mill.
           
“We try to keep the old days alive,” Bill says simply. “They’re disappearing
so fast.”
           
That same love of history guided the Christensons when they decided, a few years ago, to build a home on the Ku‘au property.
           
“We have a house in Lahaina,” says Doris. “We used to drive back to Lahaina in the dark after the restaurant closed. Then we had a horrendous car accident, and stopped driving home at night. We had a room with a cot in back of the restaurant. But it’s also where we stored crates of soda. As business grew, we’d have to climb over the soda to get to bed.”
           
Bill had designed the Lahaina house; now the Christensons told him they had a new assignment for him.
           
“We took him [Bill] to LA for buying trips,” says Floyd, “and to Santa Barbara to see the old missions we admire. We’ve spent time in the Mediterranean and wanted our house, too, to blend in with the environment, not to stick out in a ‘look-at-me’ way. We told Bill to take some chances, to do a little whimsy. We have the other home, so if something didn’t work, we could change it without a lot of inconvenience.”
           
Brave words for someone who’s about to shell out a few million clams, but Floyd and Doris had no qualms.
           
“We have been with Bill so long,” says Doris, “that we think alike. He would come up with a concept, and we’d say yes or no. I was the interior decorator. I chose the furnishings, the floors and tile and artwork, but other than colors, we didn’t give Bill too many instructions.”
           
Floyd grins. “I’d tell Bill I wanted a small house, and I could see his eyes glaze over. We were looking for a comfortable beach house, but Bill wins you over.”
           
The extraordinary house he built is certainly proof of that. It kind of makes you wonder if Michelangelo was this persuasive with the Pope.