From our interview with homeowner Rick Kinsel.

I’ve always been drawn to historic houses, houses by architects, and extreme architecture, and there are some great examples in Hawaiʻi. I looked for ages at houses before finding one. I was looking for a house that was historic, that had a historic designation already, so I wouldn’t have to do a big project or anything.

Houses from the 1960s and ’70s have always appealed to me. I attribute that to being a child of that time. I’m also an academic. I’m overly educated in Modernism, Minimalism and Brutalism, too. But I’d never heard of Tropical Brutalism until I went to Hawaiʻi, and it interested me. The houses in that style are big. They have open spaces. A lot of Modernist residences have tiny, tiny kitchens; tiny bathrooms; tiny stairwells, and that’s claustrophobic for me.

They were so thrilled that someone was interested, and before I bought the house, I understood that I could return it to Chip’s original vision and that would be worth doing. Any house an architect designed for themselves is always a very interesting thing, because it embodies their own principles without any client filtering them.

Chip made some incredible buildings, mostly commercial buildings. The two houses he made that represent his aesthetic the best are this house for himself and another house that was a model home for a development. You see in all of his projects that he is working out these ideas. They’re the same ideas in both houses, basically, like the huge open-screen windows that you can never close; they’re just open forever.

Dian Cleve, Detweiler’s former business and romantic partner, has been wonderful—my most important collaborator—and we have become good friends. She understood what I was trying to do. She saw the value in this project, which involved removing, at significant expense, all the costly improvements the past owners had done. They had sealed up all those windows, blocked up the open clerestory above, added all this supplemental lighting and built-ins and bookshelves. I took it all out. I took it all back to the original.

It seemed to me to be so smartly designed in the first place. I am a total Minimalist already. To me a blank wall is a serene and wonderful thing, and if you put something on it, that thing better be collectively equal to if not more than what was there before. I took away all the added light fixtures and went back to the original can lighting, and to me it seems like perfection. It was just so evident in Detweiler’s own designs that they had been so well considered. There’s nothing that’s unnecessary. There’s no trim on any walls or doors. There’s no moldings, no cornices. There’s nothing that’s ornamental. The materials are honest. They’re evident and they’re visible. The wood’s wood, the stone is stone, there’s concrete block and drywall. That’s it. Those are the elements.

With Dian’s help, also, I’ve been able to formalize this archive. The Detweiler archive is now a real thing. I have come to be the repository of a tremendous amount of this architect’s material. His professional papers, portfolios, drawings, project photographs, resumes, correspondence—even his checkbook, passport, and personal letters. I have all that. It just keeps coming. I have his original dishware and the decorative objects that were in this house. They’ve all been sent back to me by the people who had it.

It’s all stored. The garage is totally filled with this archival material. I’m cataloguing it with the help of two young women from a local high school—they’re in college now—Alana Shigekane and Julia Sojot. They’re going through everything. We’re cataloguing it properly and getting it on the website slowly. Without Dian’s help I would not have been able to do any of this, but now there’s a website about the house, detweilerhouse.org. Once I got that up, I proposed adding Chip to the archive of architects profiled at USModernist.org—which is a great resource on Modernist architects and designers—and he was accepted. This is all meaningful to me personally, and important to design history.

I bought the property in 2020, at the height of COVID lockdowns. I renovated, starting during COVID. It’s still ongoing. I need to replace the roof. It leaks, and I need to change out the solar panel system. It doesn’t work. And landscaping continues. I was my own contractor and I employed individuals to handle specific things with my own shoestring budget, so I had to really manage it myself.

My favorite things about the house are the Minimalist details and the lighting plan, but also being in the kitchen. It’s so cool to me. It’s like you’re in the treetops and it always reminds me of one of my favorite childhood movies, Swiss Family Robinson, where the family brought all their European gear up into the treetops.