Sandcastle

A beach house inspired by child's play

 

Sky Barnhart

 

Photography by Jason Moore  |  Styling by Michele Lin

Twenty-one years ago, Tom built a sandcastle. He built it on his favorite beach in the world: Keawakapu in South Maui. He built it solidly of stucco and plaster so that it wouldn’t wash away with the tides, but would stand as a real monument to his dreams, when he was a boy growing up in North Dakota, of someday having a home on the beach in Hawai‘i.

A sandcastle, but not the glittery kind you see suspended in glass paperweights; more like the kind a kid would make with a bucket and a shovel, just out of reach of the lapping waves.

“I was at a time in my life when I needed to be playful,” Tom says. The owner of multiple radio stations around the country, he felt he was sinking under the pressure of business and relationships. He needed to do something fun, something to relieve the stress and take his mind off his worries.

He bought a lot on Keawakapu Beach at a time when that part of South Kïhei Road was still gravel, and the houses along the beachfront were  simple, wooden post-World War II structures. Up the hill, Pi‘ilani Highway was just being built. A good friend of Tom’s who was working on the highway brought down a backhoe and helped to clear the lot to get it ready  for construction.

“I laughed to myself about the idea of building a sandcastle,” Tom says. “I said to my friend who was helping me, ‘Let’s just make it look like two kids playing in the sand and see what happens.’”