Official to give lecture about Doris Duke estate

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Doris Duke was known all her life as one of the world's wealthiest - and most private - women.

Now, almost a decade after her death, the people entrusted with caring for her Kahala estate are preparing to lift the shroud of secrecy that has hung over her Hawai'i life and home for more than 50 years.

The view from the living room looking toward the Playhouse takes advantage of the tropical setting. David Franzen, Doris Duke foundation for Islamic Art

While the foundation is still more than a year away from opening the home to the first small groups of visitors, an early chance to glimpse something of the home's artistic and architectural wonders will come this month when Pope talks about Shangri-La as part of the "Experts at the Palace" lecture series on historic preservation.

"We want to share slides and photographs that begin to give the public a sense of what's here," she said. "It's stunning and fabulous."

Duke, the only child of American Tobacco Company founder James Buchanan Duke, was known as the "richest girl in the world." At the time of her death, she was worth about $1.2 billion.

She fell in love with Hawai'i during her honeymoon in 1935 and a year later began building a Persian-influenced fortress-like home on a 4.9-acre parcel on Kahala Beach. More than 150 workers labored for more than a year on what would become the state's first $1 million house, designed by local architect Marion Sims Wyeth. A private seawall and harbor cost an additional $250,000.

In published reports of the time, one person who watched the work said it was like "the building of the pyramids." Another described it as the "palace of a vagabond king at the crossroads of the world."

Duke named it Shangri-La, after a mythical place where people never grow old.

Over the next 50 years, Duke used the home, on and off, as a personal retreat and sanctuary, working on it constantly and filling it with thousands of pieces of art and cultural artifacts.

"Many pieces are true cultural treasures," Pope said. "There are textiles, ceramics, tiles, marble work that are of international quality. She supervised much of the design herself. It's truly unique, her master work."

Bill Chapman, head of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, said many of the rooms in the complex were specifically designed to accommodate some of Duke's collection.

"Duke was a real visionary in the things she collected," he said. "She literally built the shape of the house around the rooms."

Early newspaper stories about the home describe a sort of wonderland where Duke could indulge her passion for Middle Eastern art in a tropical setting. Immense stone camels guarded the entrance. The living room had a 21-foot glass door, an 11th-century Moorish mantelpiece and a transverse oak floor brought piece by piece from a 16th-century French chateau.

At a fund-raising reception at the home in 1940, guests reported seeing a priceless display of Persian pottery in Duke's favorite light blue color. Low Arab cushions of fur were scattered around the room and in one alcove there was a life-size Sung dynasty statue of Kwan Yin.

"Much of the house is completely hidden, and intentionally so," Pope said. "A lot of people have only seen the home from the water, and even then it was hidden by a great wall." After Duke died in 1993, the home remained closed-up as lawsuits over her estate played out and experts tried to inventory the collections at Shangri-La and her other homes, in Rhode Island and New Jersey.

Slowly, the foundation is trying to change that.

In recent years, it has done a lot of long-deferred maintenance on the home and brought in outside experts to take a detailed inventory of its treasures. The foundation has obtained a conditional use permit so that the home could be used as a meeting facility for community groups, nonprofit organizations and other small groups.

The foundation has taken a go-slow approach, preferring to work with neighbors to ensure a minimum impact on the residential neighborhood, but Pope says the glory of Shangri-La is too important to be kept hidden forever.

"It's an important part of Hawai'i history, neat as all get-out," Chapman said. "It's really important that a place as unique as this remains accessible to the public."