The first surprise comes as you enter the Liljestrand House, in the Tantalus Hills above Honolulu. As you emerge at the top of the drive from the humid jungle of banyan and monkeypod trees that covers the hillside, the house appears to be a low-slung thing in natural finishes. Completed in 1952 for Howard and Betty Liljestrand and their two children (their son Bob, who grew up here, is guiding me), the house is a pinnacle example of the residential architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff, widely considered the father of Hawaiian Modernism.

Contemporary design in Honolulu
Inside, you realize this is no rustic shed. The redwood-panelled foyer with its dark ohia hardwood has clean, contemporary lines and is strikingly cool given that the place, like all Ossipoff houses, has no air conditioning. This gateway area offers choices. To the right, a quiet hallway heads into the home's private spaces: the master bedroom, through the far windows of which the forest can be seen with a hint of sky behind. To the left, an opening welcomes the visitor. You step this way, around a corner, into the airy lightness of the living room, with its glass south wall that offers a striking, panoramic view of Honolulu and the white-capped Pacific Ocean beyond.

It's breathtaking: the sudden awareness that you're at the precipice of a steep hill you hadn't seen before. But Ossipoff isn't quite through with you yet. The open-tread koa-wood staircase to your left suggests that you descend from this dramatic aerie to something more settled below. And, when you do, you find yourself in a family room that's almost entirely outdoors. One wall is open to the environment: the wide shoulder of green grass with forests beyond, trees now rising high above you again, and, spilling out from the indoors, the warm brown tone of a polished concrete lanai, that shaded open area for outdoor living that's the social heart of the house in this part of the world.

It's like an anti-basement—the most protected and intimate part of the structure, yet the least enclosed. As I breathe the intense floral and botanical freshness of the island, I imagine that Ossipoff would be satisfied with the effect he's had on me: this series of surprises ending with a sense of having arrived, finally, in the real Hawaii.

Real Hawaiian architecture
An architecture that really speaks Hawaiian is hard to visualize if you've only seen Honolulu or Waikiki. Tourism and real-estate investment through the '70s and '80s left those areas dominated by a grid of skyscraping, beach-hugging hotels and condominiums, sprinkled through with the odd pre-modern throw-back, like the beach-front Royal Hawaiian and Moana Surfrider hotels.
Ossipoff's work was done before all that. He arrived in Hawaii in 1931, having graduated from architecture school at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked for various local architects before setting up his own practice. From early on, and particularly just post-war, he was developing a distinctly Hawaiian style, something he described as "thoroughly enjoyable and outdoors."

That two-part vision, so simple on paper, drew complexly on Ossipoff's background. His childhood was spent in Tokyo. Ossipoff's father had been a military attaché for the Czar; unable to return to Russia after the revolution, the family stayed in Japan until emigrating to the U.S. shortly after the devastating Kanto earthquake of 1923, which killed over 100,000 people.
In Hawaii, the youthful Ossipoff found a place perfectly suited to the Japanese house he had loved: a thin-walled, light, framed structure that was also open to nature. These ideas fit with both the environment and the culture of Hawaii. And they responded to Ossipoff's own devotion to nature. "Few things made him shake and quiver," as the architect Dean Sakamoto writes in his book Hawaii Modern. "But nature did. Having survived a terrible earthquake at age 14, he knew nature's devastating power. And when he came to Hawaii, he saw again a nature that could be overwhelming."

The challenge was to develop an architecture that blended those Hawaiian and Japanese ideas with a contemporary aesthetic and the newest building technology. Ossipoff did that using what Sakamoto refers to as "adaptive modernism," not monumental like the International Style, but "a warming of international modernism to accommodate the gentle rhythms of island life, specifically its peace with nature."

Ossipoff's legacy
From his largest projects to his smallest, Ossipoff was able to build elegant structures that work in a uniquely Hawaiian way: open to the elements, but protecting occupants from both rain and heat without air conditioning. At the Outrigger Canoe Club, dining room and lounge areas tumble to the beach under redwood arbours on coral pillars woven over with tree branches. And over at the Honolulu International Airport terminal, you reach the gates by walking high over open gardens along ramps open to the elements but screened from rain by overhangs. No airport in the world smells like Honolulu International: flowers and beaches and humid breezes. The place breathes Hawaii.

How exactly Ossipoff designed structures to meet these objectives was not something he liked to talk about. "He was not a theoretician," Sakamoto's book informs me. And Bob Liljestrand remembers testing this once—asking Ossipoff, who grew to be a good family friend, if he could articulate a design philosophy.

"He said no," Liljestrand remembers.

"He could be tough on clients," Honolulu Academy director Stephen Little tells me later, as we look through the Goodsill House where he lives. "He'd just say: trust me."

Most of them did. And in the case of the Goodsill House, it paid off. Finished the same year as the Liljestrand House, the Goodsill residence is more intimate and more suburban. Set in a completely different microclimate than the Liljestrand House—hot and dry, a former cactus desert—the house is composed of three separate buildings, closely arranged around a central lanai. With wide screens that can open almost the entire side of the main house, the Goodsill residence accomplishes Ossipoff's objectives with its comfortable interplay of cool interior spaces and sunlit gardens, with light and shade available in every part of the house, and with refined Japanese detailing. And yet with an air that's casual, friendly and social.

Intimate, social space
Nothing captures those qualities better than the Goodsill lanai, which, as at the Liljestrand's up the hill, is at once the most intimate and the most social space in the house. Ossipoff sets the three buildings so that they are not perfectly squared to one another, but slightly opened and covered by the wide-hanging eaves. Here, friends and family can gather on sofas around the fire pit, rain or shine, surrounded by gardens, with the peak of Diamond Head just appearing over the high hedges. It sits on an ordinary 17,000-square-foot Kahala building lot, comfortably middle class in its day. But as the trade winds cool the air and sift through the mock orange trees, you feel like you're sitting in the very heart of Hawaii.

To fall in love with Ossipoff's work is easy enough. But it comes with one minor downside. Every time you leave Honolulu, you'll be reminded by the International Terminal that the last big project of Ossipoff's life also sealed his fate, introducing all the cultural trends—high-volume tourism, real-estate investment and a diminished sensitivity to Hawaii's natural beauty—that ultimately pushed his work to the periphery and out of fashion.

But then, walking to your gate over those beautiful, fragrant gardens, taking in your last sensory impressions of Hawaii, it may also occur to you that the world does turn. And that, someday, another man like Vladimir Ossipoff just might surprise us again. wl

Getting there: Hawaii travel guide
To Stay
Outrigger Reef on the Beach
A $110-million refurbishment makes this a great choice for mid-century charm with an updated comfort-kitsch feel to it.  808-923-3111, outrigger.com

Kahala Hotel and Resort
Exclusivity and remoteness, if you're into that kind of thing. Ten minutes outside of Waikiki and high-modern cool. 808-739-8888, kahalaresort.com

Modern Honolulu
Was the much-hyped Waikiki Edition for all of three minutes, until an ownership dispute muddled everything. It still boasts Ian Schrager's touches, and a Japanese restaurant run by Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto. 808-943-5800, aquaresorts.com

To Dine
If you're going for what the old-school Hawaiians eat, then there are only two places to bother with. The first is Helena's Hawaiian Food (808-845-8044, helenashawaiianfood.com), the other is Ono Hawaiian Food  (808-737-2275). Both are perpetually busy. If you're more interested in the area's big name chefs, then the godfather is Roy Yamaguchi and his Roy's chain (808-396-7697, roysrestaurant.com), with Alan Wong and his two restaurants Alan Wong (808-949-2526, alanwongs.com) and the Pineapple Room (808-945-6573) running a close second. Both offer excellent, though expensive food that nods to the local cuisine without being slavish about it. Another interesting option is Sam Choy (808-545-7979, samchoy.com), whose eponymous fish shack is out near Pier 28 where the fish comes ashore. It's honest and fresh. Chef Mavro (808-944-4714, chefmavro.com) serves truly exquisite creations pulling on a regional sensibility. It's unexpected and superb and worth a visit. wl