Memphis, Hawaii

An island home that also happens to be a design paradise.

- James Tarmy

The entrance to the home of Adrian and Lesley Olabuenaga looks like the gateway to a fun house dreamed up by Dr. Seuss: A fire-engine-red door gives way to a canary-yellow entryway, and once inside there’s a glass table held up by a sphere, a square, and a triangle. One bathroom is tiled in Pepto-Bismol pink.

For 21 years, the owners have kept their Maui home exactly as it was imagined by its architect, Ettore Sottsass. The Italian designer was the driving force behind the Memphis Group, a loose coalition of artists who developed the zany patterns and bright colors that defined the late 1980s and early ’90s. He built only seven houses during his lifetime, and this one, completed in 1997, is arguably his most distinctive.

This month, the couple are putting the house on the market. (It has multiple levels, and the Olabuenagas are getting older.) They’ve listed it with Becky Hanna of Island Sotheby’s International Realty for $9.8 million.

The Olabuenagas were already admirers of the movement when they commissioned Sottsass. They sold accessories by Memphis designers through their company, Acme Studios Inc., and after Sottsass agreed to do the home, they handed the reins to him entirely. “We wanted it to be a complete expression of what he had in his brain,” Adrian says. “We didn’t want to get in the way.”