Dobelle to sell Portlock home

By Jim Dooley
Advertiser Staff Writer

University of Hawai'i president Evan Dobelle is selling his Portlock home after owning it for less than a year.

Dobelle has said the house was a second home that he and his family planned to use after he leaves the university.

UH vice president Paul Costello said yesterday the house is "an investment property" that Dobelle has on the market "for sale or lease."

The university provides housing for Dobelle and his wife, Kit, in the historic College Hill residence in Manoa. UH and the University of Hawai'i Foundation have spent more than $1 million renovating and furnishing that home for the Dobelles.

The Dobelles bought the house at 106 Lumahai St. for $1.4 million last September, putting down $300,000 in cash and financing the balance with a First Hawaiian Bank mortgage, according to property records.

Now it is on the market for $1.47 million.

The four-bedroom, three-bath house was advertised as a "home of the week" in the Sunday Advertiser real estate section. It has 3,510 square feet of living area and a swimming pool on a 14,702-square-foot lot.

In a related development, the family of renowned Island artist Jean Charlot has donated his Kahala area home to the university, and it may be used as a residence for the new UH-Manoa chancellor, although Costello said, "We have not really yet determined a use for it."

Dobelle said in March he was thinking about moving out of College Hill and letting the new chancellor live there. That would mean finding him a new home.

Costello said all housing plans are fluid at the moment. He did not know whether alterations would be required on the three-bedroom, three-bath Charlot home.

The home on Kahala Avenue, next to the Wai'alae Country Club, was donated by Charlot's children in November. Built in 1958, it is on the state and national registers of historic places and is valued, for property tax purposes, at $584,000.

Charlot, an accomplished muralist, painter, cartoonist, playwright and poet, was on the UH faculty from 1949 to 1966. He died in 1979.