That special appeal in interior design
By Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer
Shari Saiki was a Rainbow Dancer at the University of Hawai'i in search of a career when she fell in love with the idea of designing beautiful buildings — works of art, really — that could be admired by generations of people.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
Instead, the promise of her new career turned into a part-time job in which she was drafting plans for nothing more exciting than re-roofing projects at schools.
Shari Saiki, who runs her own business in Kaka'ako, has been in charge of the interior design for model homes at The Peninsula at Hawaii Kai. Call her a magician in attaining the right color, quality, taste — anything but a "decorator."
So Saiki pointed her drafting skills in another direction, Now, 14 years later, she has her own interior design company that has found praise and revenue through decorating model homes for multimillion-dollar residential projects.
Splashing model homes full of color, furniture and accessories not only frees Saiki from worrying about the tastes of picky clients, but also showcases her work to thousands of people.
Some 80 percent of her new business in the past two years has come from people who walked through the latest project she worked on, The Peninsula at Hawai'i Kai.
"Shari's really making a name for herself," said developer Stanford Carr, who's building The Peninsula at Hawai'i Kai. "Obviously being involved with these projects creates a tremendous amount of exposure for her."
Saiki's Kaka'ako-based company, Shari Saiki Design Studio Inc., decorated the project's 12 model homes. Two of the models won the Building Industry Association's Grand Champion awards — in 2001 and 2002. Saiki's work also won the Parade of Homes' award for excellence in interior design.
In just four years, her company has grown from a 10-by-10-foot cubicle bringing in $300,000 in sales to a 2,000-foot showroom and studio on Pohukaina Street that generate $1.3 million in business per year.
In the middle of it all, Saiki, now 40, got married and gave birth to a boy. She also turned over the business side to her husband, Bryan Kitashima, 41, a former senior business analyst for the Hawai'i Medical Service Association.
Saiki's path to interior design and business was never clear. There was no grand scheme. Not even a direction, she said.
Saiki grew up in Pearl City taking ballet, tap and jazz dance lessons and performing in dance groups. She was a cheerleader at Pearl City High School and went to UH with no idea of what she wanted to study.
In her sophomore year, Saiki signed up for an introductory architecture class for no particular reason and later decided to major in architecture. Her head became filled with dreams of building great monuments to design like the ones she saw in her textbooks.
Her first architecture job as a drafter, while still attending UH, knocked Saiki back to reality.
"The instructors built up the students' ego about how prestigious it is to be an architect," Saiki said. "The reality was the opposite of what my instructors taught me."
She graduated from UH in 1988 and got a drafting job with one of the Islands' top interior designers — Mark Masuoka.
"I started out as nothing," Saiki said. "I was just a draftsman."
Through the work, Saiki saw flashes of the love she once had for architecture.
"It was fun," she said. "It was design but it was more personal. It's really an art and you create a whole environment."
Masuoka saw something of himself in Saiki and soon made her one of his 19 designers. Out of all of them, Masuoka said, Saiki had the best eye.
Five years after she started with Masuoka, Saiki became the main designer for Mark Masuoka Design.
"Her talent for seeing quality items was a lot better than the other people I had," said Masuoka, who now lives in Las Vegas and is retired at the age of 67. "As far as having the taste level I really wanted, Shari had the best."
Masuoka's parents on Maui were ill and he was spending much of his time flying back and forth. He had enough wealth to retire comfortably and wasn't interested in selling a company that bore his name to someone else.
By 1995, Masuoka decided to groom Saiki to run her own firm. He flew her to North Carolina to meet with representatives of the major furniture manufacturers. He wrote letters offering his credit to help Saiki.
In return, Saiki promised to live up to the commitments Masuoka had made to his clients.
Saiki opened her own shop with almost no overhead, except $500 a month in rent. She worked on about 10 jobs for residential clients her first year.
By the end of her second year, Saiki was invited by Castle & Cooke to make a presentation to work on five model homes for the Mililani Mauka project called The Legacy. Three other Hawai'i companies and two from the Mainland also made presentations.
"I just wanted to make a good showing and maybe later they'd take a look at me," Saiki said.
Saiki put together swatches of colors and furniture patterns. Kitashima helped organize her thoughts into a 90-minute PowerPoint presentation. The people at Castle & Cooke said they'd let Saiki know their decision by the end of the week.
An hour later, they called back to say that she got the $300,000 job. The project went on to win the 2000 Parade of Homes Grand Champion Award.
Saiki felt much more confident making a presentation for Carr's Hawai'i Kai project because of her Castle & Cooke experience and because she had worked with Carr when she was with Masuoka's company.
The styles in the 12 model homes at The Peninsula range from traditional Hawaiian to Indonesian, with a heavy dose of Saiki's favorite look of bold colors, clean lines and Asian accents.
She likes to put together colors that don't seem to make sense on paper, such as a wall painted light blue that juts up against another one painted brown — bordering a room decorated with a huge Chinese chest, bright red couch and heavy wooden chair with a checkerboard-patterned pillow.
Carr didn't like the paint colors that Saiki chose for many of the rooms — honey-mustard, deep red, light green. But Saiki told him to be patient, that the look would pay off once her furniture arrived.
She was in the middle of arranging everything at The Peninsula when her son, Lucca, wanted to be born. So her friend and mentor, Masuoka, flew over from Las Vegas to finish the installation.
He was impressed with the evolution in Saiki's taste.
"I do see a little bit here and there from what she got through the years she worked for me, but basically it's her style," Masuoka said. "The lines are very clean and very crisp. Her color ranges are absolutely phenomenal."
Before he met Saiki, Kitashima didn't know that interior designers had much more training in architecture, lighting systems and design than interior decorators. His not knowing the difference got them in a fight on one of their first dates.
Now they work together and Kitashima wants to keep doubling the amount of business.
Saiki worries more about challenging herself.
"I just want to keep designing," she said. "I'll keep doing it as long as it's interesting."
Reach Dan Nakaso at dnakaso@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8085.
