For developer Christopher Hemmeter, bigger was always better, and extravagance was a necessary ingredient in everything he built.
His fantasy hotels in the 1970s and '80s, with their endless marble corridors, brass-plated adornments and splashing waterfalls, earned Hemmeter a reputation as the father of destination resort development. Some wrote off his projects, though, as gaudy and lacking in Hawaiian character.
Hemmeter was born in Washington, D.C., in 1939. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Shortly after graduating from Cornell University with a degree in hotel management in 1962, Hemmeter moved to Hawai'i. He took a job as a management trainee at an exotic hotel from an earlier era — the Royal Hawaiian.
But Hemmeter dreamed of creating and owning his own Hawai'i hotels. He told his boss, who then asked where Hemmeter planned to get the money.
"I have no idea, but somehow I'll put it together," Hemmeter said. "If I have to be a bartender or whatever, that's my goal, that's my dream, that's what I want to be."
First he built restaurants. Then the Hawaiian Regent Hotel, which opened in 1971. Five years later, he opened the $100 million, twin-towered, 1,260-room Hyatt Regency Hotel in Waikiki.
Hemmeter built big on the Neighbor Islands, too: the Hyatt Regency Waikoloa, Hyatt Regency Maui, Westin Maui, Westin Kaua'i.
In 1988, Forbes magazine named Hemmeter one of the 400 richest Americans, with $225 million in assets. But Hemmeter, friend to U.S. presidents, once said he wanted to be known as the "only person who rides in a Rolls-Royce in a dirty shirt, sweaty Bermudas and goes barefoot."
Hemmeter left Hawai'i in the 1990s amid the protracted economic downturn that gripped the Islands. He was angry at the business climate and had just lost out on a billion-dollar plan to develop what would become Aloha Tower Marketplace.
Hemmeter's fortunes on the Mainland, however, never soared as they had for him during his Hawai'i heyday. In 1997, after the failure of several Louisiana casino developments, Hemmeter filed for personal bankruptcy.
Soon after that, he developed Parkinson's disease and cancer. He died at his home in Brentwood, Calif., in 2003. Hemmeter was 64.
