Kahala's hidden utopia is no longer a secret

By Wanda A. Adams
Assistant Features Editor

Jin de Silva, Doris Duke's former caretaker, shows off the Turkish Room, where he cut inlaid stone for the floor and fountain. Photos by Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

The view through a carved woodwork wall toward the courtyard.

Owen Moore, the artwork collections manager, sits in the dining room, where guests could eat at a low table with pillows on the floor.

Shangri La tours begin with orientation at the Academy of Arts. Starting: Wednesday; however, tours were sold out until Dec. 11 as this went to press. Tour times: Wednesdays through Saturdays. First tour, 8:30 a.m.; last tour, 1:30 p.m. Where: Tour begins at the Honolulu Academy of Arts with a viewing of the Arts of the Islamic World gallery exhibition and video orientation; departs for the property by 12-person van at timed intervals. Tour duration: 2 1/2 hours; you'll spend 1 1/2 hours at Shangri La. Ticket price: $25, including Academy of Arts admission and van ride from academy to Shangri La; $15 for Hawai'i residents. Ticket limit: Four per person; no group reservations or school tours. Reservations: Required. Call (866) DUKE-TIX — that's (866) 385-3849 — 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays; 3 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sundays (it's a Mainland ticket service). Or you can reserve online at honoluluacademy.org. No tickets are sold at Shangri La and no tours will begin there.

Although she was an extremely private person, the late heiress took great pride in Shangri La, her Black Point mansion, and the objects she collected there. Her neighbor and friend of 20 years, actor-singer Jim Nabors, thinks that perhaps this is because her other homes were inherited, but this one she built herself. She told him often about her plans to make it a public place.

Jin de Silva, who for more than a decade was the caretaker of the property and Duke's partner in many Shangri La art projects, recalls that the woman he still respectfully calls "Miss Duke" delighted to give first-time visitors a tour. She would tell the story of each collected piece, each architectural innovation and each purposeful arrangement.

In the rise-and-fall accent of his native Sri Lanka, de Silva described those glory days: "If you visited the house in the evening, I would be meeting you at the door and taking you into the living room, and then I would go and tell Miss Duke that you had arrived. She would come and greet you and I would bring drinks, and she would be always talking of all this, telling you about her things. That is the way she enjoyed her life."

Deborah Pope, executive director of Shangri La, said Duke's intent was to make her Hawai'i retreat not merely an attraction for gawkers but, as the will says, "a center for the study and understanding of Middle Eastern art and culture."

In escorting visitors around her home, Duke invited them to share her vision, which marries Middle Eastern ideas about light, space and patterns with Hawai'i's welcoming climate, both materially and in our ways. Nabors said she found a spirituality here that she encountered nowhere else.

The Shangri La tours begin at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, where the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art has endowed a new Arts of the Islamic World Gallery, and where a short but revealing orientation film will set the stage before vanloads of 12 visitors each head out to the house for a 1 1/2-hour tour.

Started with a honeymoon

You learn, if you did not already know, that Duke, an heiress orphaned when she was 12, married at 23 a man considerably older than herself. He would later fade from the picture, but in 1935 the two embarked on an around-the-world honeymoon that included the Middle East. There, the bride was so taken with what she saw that she commissioned a marble bedroom and bathroom suite patterned after ideas she had encountered in the palaces of the Mogul emperors in India.

Headed home, the couple made an extended stay in Hawai'i, where Duke found another lasting interest.

Duke was the Jackie Onassis of her day, an object of ceaseless interest to paparazzi and tabloid readers, who were fascinated by the doings of a woman so young and so rich.

In the Islands, however, she was given a measure of peace and space. The athletic socialite made friends — most famously with the Kahanamoku brothers of beachboy fame, who taught her to surf. She was nicknamed "Lahilahi," meaning fragile, for her wispy voice and slight figure.

In 1936, she bought the land that would become Shangri La, and for the next 56 years, until her death in 1992, she worked on the home.

What may have seemed the whim of someone rich enough to conjure up whatever she wished — including an Islamic pleasure palace on the shore near Waikiki — is now, through the power of Duke's fortune and her considerable will, a means of assuring that visiting scholars, artists and any interested visitor can be introduced to her unique vision.

A true lover of art

Duke was a collector, patron and maker of art.

She gathered pieces ranging from a single decorative tile to an entire 19th-century Damascus house, which she had dismantled, salvaging its painted panels to line the walls of her Turkish Room. In the living room, the carved marble fireplace was purchased at auction from the leavings of William Randolph Hearst's bankruptcy.

She had, said Pope, a collector's eye and the ability to make "curatorial decisions," with the help, over the years, of curators, architects, auction houses, artists and artisans around the world.

"When she found something she wanted to learn about, like Islamic art, she would hire the best scholars to teach her," Nabors recalled.

Duke also employed an estate manager, Violet Mimaki, who between 1968 and 1986 created a detailed file-card record of every object and furnishing in the house; documentation better than that found in some museums, Pope said, although mysteries persist about the origins of many pieces.

Duke might install an object on a shelf behind glass, but she was just as likely to affix it to a wall in a particular pattern, or cut it apart to fit into some mosaic of her own devising. She sometimes spent weeks pondering the positioning of a grouping — like a child playing, said de Silva affectionately.

"She really enjoyed what she did, and she was somewhat of an artisan herself," recalled Nabors.

One example of her ability to recognize an exceptional piece, and how to display it, Pope said, is the magnificent mihrab, a tile prayer niche designed to help the worshipper find the direction of Mecca, as Islamic doctrine requires.

Duke placed it so that it is framed in a successive vista of doorways and windows and visible all the way across the lawn. Aquamarine, azure, gold and burnt sienna glow dully and draw the eye, as she intended. This piece had to be quickly torn off the wall and hidden in the basement during World War II, as were many treasures.

Duke and de Silva worked three years on the elaborate Turkish or Damascus Room, a tile-floored retreat lined with painted panels and various artworks, and a fountain of her own design.

Duke didn't just give directions and then go out to lunch; she toiled alongside her hired helpers, cleaning grime from tiles and wood panels, supervising the cutting of marble just so. This room is not on the tour but will be later.

Final project unfinished

Duke's last project was a grouping of tiles cemented into a stucco wall in the passage between the living room and dining room.

De Silva recalls how she called for the miscellaneous pieces: "Where are my tiles? Why are you always hiding my tiles from me?"

The tiles aren't related, but Duke had ideas for placing them in relationships. However, she was unable to finish the project before she left Shangri La that year — she generally spent the winter and early spring here — and then she fell ill. The last spot remains unfilled.

The heiress took what was before her — including the 4.9 acres that became Shangri La — and did with it what she willed. It took two years for workers and earthmovers to turn a sloping beachfront into what appears from the sea to be a Moorish fortress. A breakwater creates a calm enclosure for swimming, and the increased elevation assures a long view of the shore, from an odd, rippled perspective of one side of Diamond Head to East Honolulu's curving shore.

One way that Duke took an Islamic approach to the house is in the blank face it shows to those who have not yet been invited in. The dozen tourists delivered by minivan will enter by an anonymous gate. Arriving at the courtyard parking area, you encounter only blank white wall and the huge wooden front door, a 19th-century piece from Egypt or Syria, which bids guests in carved Arabic, "Enter herein in peace and security."

Throughout the house, rooms are walled off from each other, or glimpsed through teasing vistas — a door, a carved window or screen. In the entryway, for example, you can hear water music from the fountain in the courtyard beyond, but your view is cut off by a carved black screen, allowing only a fragmented impression of color and light.

"Each room," says architect Kazi Ashraf in the opening film, "is a different world."

A day in the life

The mihrab is a prayer niche of iridescent tiles from the 13th century. It directs praying Muslims toward Mecca.

Moore walks past carved woodwork that casts patterns of light on the foyer floor.

Afterward, work time. De Silva might have covered the low table in the dining room — actually an expansive wood-and-brass bed platform Duke found in India — with tools and materials. She liked to work there, perched on a cushioned pouf, rifling through a sheaf of foolscap sheets on which she sketched her plans.

She also entertained there.

"I've had some fun at that table," said Nabors, who tells a hilarious story of a prominent Honolulu businessman who, visiting the house for dinner for the first time, lowered himself onto a cushion and flipped head over heels.

On the floor is an antique Persian carpet that had belonged to Duke's father, James Buchanan Duke, who left her the wealth of two empires, one of tobacco products and the other of hydroelectric power.

She loved that carpet, said Pope; she had it rebacked, rewoven and repaired numerous times. It was a tangible link to the father whom Pope thinks also bequeathed Duke his penchant for moving earth: Duke had three primary homes, in New Jersey, in California, and here. all are now to be opened to the public.

... and finally, the garden

The home is very much as Duke left it.

In preparing it for its new role, Pope said, "We took a historical preservation approach; our goal was to repair, rehabilitate, bring it up to code and leave as few traces behind as possible."

The home was rewired, the entryway altered to accommodate a wheelchair ramp, and a new roof was set in place.

The task was made easier by the fact that, as Pope wryly commented, "Miss Duke bought in bulk"— so replacement materials were readily available. Security cameras also were installed; Duke's idea of security, said Jin, was a dozen German shepherds, each with the last name of "Duke."

The project is so vast that the Doris Duke Foundation has had to take it in stages. Only the public rooms of the main house are on view now; the bedroom suites, the kitchens and the Playhouse will come later.

The last stop on the tour is a walled Moorish Garden, patterned after the famous gardens of Shalimar in Pakistan, with long, narrow reflecting pools, a symmetrical arrangement of plantings, and a tiled meditation path running down the center.

Entering the garden after all the rooms full of treasures, after the expansive ocean view, after the lawns and the startling daffodil-colored outdoor sofa where Duke once posed for a Vogue layout, a visitor is surprised into nervous laughter — not because the garden is ridiculous, but because there is more. "It is too much to take in. Too much."

But it is what Doris Duke meant it to be. A vision of paradise.