Maui Wowie

Leverone Design and Walker Warner Architects collaborate on a Hawaiian guesthouse with a joyous spirit all its own

- MAYER RUS

Any designer or architect worth their salt will tell you that having an inspired client, wholly engaged in the conceptual and aesthetic underpinnings of a commission, is an enormous boon to the prospect of original creative expression. Just ask Matthew Leverone of Leverone Design and architect Greg Warner of Walker Warner, San Francisco-based collaborators who recently returned to a project on the Hawaiian island of Maui to build a new guesthouse for just such a client. “She gave us a fully articulated narrative about how she wanted the new structure to connect with the main house but also offer a variety of different sensations. She gave us plenty of evocative touchstones—Brazilian music, Aperol spritzes, Georg Baselitz bronze hands, perfect jeans—but her primary concern was the experience, how the house and everything in it make you feel,” Leverone says of his client, the distaff half of a California-based couple who use the property as a multigenerational family retreat.

ABOVE THE LIVING ROOM IS OUTFITTED WITH A HANGING CHAIR BY PATRICIA URQUIOLA FOR LOUIS VUITTON'S OBJETS NOMADES COLLECTION, A PAIR OF VINTAGE MIDCENTURY CHAIRS BY IB KOFOD-LARSEN THROUGH GALERIE HALF, AND A SOFA, LOUNGE, AND BLEACHED-MAPLE COCKTAIL TABLE BY ROGAN GREGORY, ALL SET ON A CAPPELEN DIMYR RUG THROUGH GARDE. PAINTING BY SUZAN FRECON.

“I think of design in terms of migration and discovery. Rooms have to have their own voice and purpose to draw you to them and nurture the daily rituals that take place within them,” muses the eloquent homeowner. “Like art and music, they have to transport people to a certain place that isn’t prescribed but open to interpretation. Design isn’t so much an intellectual exercise but an instinctual one,” she continues.