Island People
Interior designer Spalding: Arbiter of good taste

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Phyllis Spalding knows a good thing when she sees it.

An interior designer, art collector and patron, businesswoman, connoisseur, socialite and powerful behind-the-scenes force in Honolulu's art world, Spalding has an unerring ability to recognize quality.

Interior designer Phyllis Spalding may not be able to define good taste, but she knows it when she sees it. And industry professionals have benefited from her 50 years of design expertise. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

Laurance Rockefeller, George Harrison, Henry Kaiser and Clare Booth Luce are just a few of her clients. Washington Place, the state Capitol, 'Iolani Palace and the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel are among the projects she has worked on. Her Mandalay stores at the Halekulani Hotel and Four Seasons Resort in Wailea are popular with well-heeled visitors and residents alike.

"She's a woman of exquisite taste," said George Ellis, director of the Honolulu Academy of Arts. "She sets a very high standard for all of us in the area of artistic knowledge, quality and taste. In the art world, she has what they call a very good eye."

Yet Spalding stumbles when you ask her to define good taste. She has trouble saying why she prefers one thing over another, or defining what makes one thing more valuable than something else.

	Phyllis Spalding
•	Age: 81
•	Background: Born in Wyoming, raised in California, worked as an actress on Broadway. Moved to Honolulu in 1945 after a World War II job with the Red Cross in the Pacific.
•	Family: Widowed. Married for more than 20 years to Philip Spalding Jr., a prominent Honolulu businessman. Two sons, Michael and Kit, both of Maui.
•	A memorable moment: During a trip to Mexico to visit a cousin in 1942, Spalding's beauty caught the eye of the country's most famous painter, Diego Rivera. Sitting across from Spalding at dinner one night, Rivera boldly announced that he intended to paint the young actress. The painting, a light-hearted portrait of a carefree woman in a traditional Mexican dress, hung in Spalding's home for years until she donated it recently to the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.
•	Quote: "You don't tell the clients anything. You just try to find out what they like and work around that in the best of taste. Good taste. Always good taste."

Spalding never received formal training in the arts.

"She's just got an innate sense of good design," said Charles Black, a longtime Honolulu designer who said Spalding's interior design company was the first of its kind in Honolulu. "She's been able to take that sense and mix it with social contacts and experience to help a whole lot of people here over the years."

There was little in her early life, though, to suggest she would end up being a grand dame of Honolulu's artistic world.

She was born Phyllis Dobson in Wyoming in 1920, moved to California at an early age after her father died, and headed east to New York City, where she launched herself on a promising Broadway career, playing a series of blond, blue-eyed ingenues in the pre-World War II productions.

During the early years of the war, she did radio programs for the Office of War Information with Orson Welles, than signed on with the American Red Cross, which sent her to Guadalcanal, Australia and New Caledonia (where she was the first woman to land after the troops) helping with programs to entertain enlisted men.

On her way home from the war, she hitched a ride to Honolulu, where she found a home.

During her first week here, friends invited her to a party with the elite social families of the day. Having nothing but Red Cross uniforms to wear, she dashed off to a small dress shop on Dillingham Boulevard, bought a bright silk dress and "amused everyone and pleased myself with the over-the-top-splash I made."

Phyllis Spalding credits her mother-in-law, Alice Cooke Spalding, with teaching her how to appreciate "beautiful things." Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

In 1952, she divorced her first husband, automobile dealer Paul Fagan Jr., and married Philip E. Spalding Jr., joining one of the most famous art families on the island. Philip Spalding's mother, Alice Cooke Spalding, came from the family that founded the Honolulu Academy of Arts. Philip and Phyllis lived in the 1925 family home in Makiki Heights which later became The Contemporary Museum.

"My mother-in-law was my real mentor," Spalding says. "She taught me how to appreciate beautiful things."

The family traveled extensively, making forays into Japan and trying their hand at archaeology, digging on the Greek Island of Delos, where they helped uncover remains of mosaic floors and scarab coins dating 2,400 years.

After years of helping friends buy home furnishings, Spalding opened her own decorating firm in 1959.

"There was nothing like it at the time," Black said. "Back then, there was no such thing as professional design. There was no schooling, no formal training and no certification for designers." Years later, Spalding was a founding member of the first Society of Interior Designers, Honolulu chapter.

Over the years, Spalding built a resume second to none in the Islands.

During construction of the state Capitol, she was the only woman consultant, choosing the fabrics, rugs and wall coverings that give the interior offices and halls their warm, Hawai'i feel. She helped redesign the interior of some of Hawai'i's best old buildings: Castle & Cooke, Alexander & Baldwin and the Oahu Country Club. In 1965, she helped produce a series of Hawaiian rooms for the New York World's Fair.

For Rockefeller's Big Island home ("a powerful man with strong tastes," she says), she coordinated all the fabrics — including draperies, bedspreads, wall prints and pillow coverings. For Harrison's Maui home, she worked closely with the ex-Beatle and his wife while two of their bodyguards stood outside the office door.

A Ming Dynasty vase is among items for sale at Spalding's Mandalay store at the Halekulani Hotel. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

Somehow, none of it feels cluttered or out of place. Her guiding rule for collecting is "if you don't like it, you don't need it."

That spirit helped with one of her greatest discoveries.

Traveling in Japan in the 1960s, she stumbled across the studio of a then-relatively unknown potter named Shimizu Uichi, who had a bold, unconventional style and a mastery of traditional glazes. Spalding immediately fell in love with and began buying his work, storing much of it on an oversized ledge around her bathtub as her collection grew with each subsequent trip to Japan.

Today, Shimizu is considered a Living National Treasure in Japan, and Spalding recently donated her collection of Shimizu glazed stoneware vessels, worth more than $1 million, to The Contemporary Museum.

While Spalding has gradually gotten out of the interior design business, she remains an active collector and the principal buyer for her Mandalay stores in the Halekulani Hotel on Oahu and the Four Seasons Resort at Wailea, Maui, both of which stock an intriguing blend of east and west, folk and chic.

Still spry at 81, Spalding makes at least one buying and collecting trip to Asia every year, meeting up with old friends and reliable dealers she has used over the years.

"It's always a mystery what she'll come back with from one of her trips," said Halekulani store manager Allie Macmillan. "You're just sure it will be in good taste."