Slaughterhouse Beach House

Forty-three-foot-wide glass-and-steel walls on hydraulic pistons flip up to open both sides of the main living area to the trade winds of Honolua Bay.

There’s a long,  easy break that rolls in to one side of Slaughterhouse Point, and on some days, when the wind is out of the east, Bill Nguyen and his sons walk down the pathway that leads from their property to Maui’s Mokuleia Bay and swim and surf till sunset. Nguyen, an Internet entrepreneur and a passionate surfer, comes here with his wife, Amanda, and their two sons (Jacob, 5, and Jackson, 2) to escape his hectic dot-com career and reconnect with his family. Their new house— which fuses Hawaiian tradition with some of the latest innovations in sustainable architecture—is a tribute to the wildness of this place. Since 1998, Nguyen, 39, has developed seven successful Silicon Valley start-ups, including Onebox (Internet phone messaging) and Seven (universal mobile email). “I’ve been called a serial entrepreneur,” says Nguyen, who recently sold the music-streaming site he co-founded in 2007, Lala, to Apple for around $80 million (he remains CEO). Lala lets users upload their music collections into the Cloud and stream them anywhere in the world. “Lala was named after my son Jacob’s first words,” he says.

The site overlooks both Mokuleia Bay and Honolua Bay.

The son of Vietnamese parents who immigrated to the United States in 1969, during the war, Nguyen bought the entire 18-acre property in 2001 with the idea of building a sustainable house that was solid and low-maintenance. “We wanted a simple box, a surf house,” he says, but the state of Hawaii maintains strict control over waterfront development—in this case, the site is adjacent to a 45-acre marine life conservation district—and Nguyen had no guarantee he’d be allowed to build anything. (There used to be an actual slaughterhouse here. It closed down 40 years ago, but the name stuck.)
While searching for an architect, he stumbled across images of Chicken Point Cabin, a vacation house in northern Idaho that was designed by Olson Kundig Architects. Nguyen was intrigued. The house was relatively small and fit perfectly with its lakeside setting. It featured an exaggerated glass door that cranked open by means of an oversize mechanical device. “I’m a techie guy and I love gadgets,” Nguyen says. He called the firm on the spur of the moment and flew to Seattle.
Nguyen and the firm’s principal architect, Tom Kundig, recognized each other as kindred spirits: both innovators and outdoorsmen. But planning was slow. They struggled to make sure that the elements fit the site, working closely with Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources to address the issues of scale, ground coverage and sight lines. Ten proposals were rejected before they came up with a solution that worked for everyone.
The result was three pavilions laid out like little teahouses in a curving line dictated by the topography and the prevailing breezes. They’re set lightly on a grassy patch surrounded by wilder terrain that drops precipitously to the rocky beach and crashing surf. The house is situated high enough to provide spectacular views, but low enough to blend in with the landscape of pili grass and ironwood trees. “We wanted to create a sense of tucked-in shelter, a yin and yang experience,” Nguyen says. “Surfers like it because you can’t see it from the water.”

Nguyen flips his son Jacob into the pool in front of the house’s main pavilion.

One of the major environmental problems in Maui is the runoff pouring down from the dormant Mauna Kahalawai volcano, which washes topsoil into the sea. The plantings are native: pili grass, ’a’ali’i bushes and more than 20 varieties of ground cover, including ilima, iliahi, nehe and hinahina, which all help stem erosion and conserve water (in contrast to the sweeping lawns at most resorts on the island). They also planted dozens of milo, koai’a and ohi’a trees. “The ohi’a trees are smaller and slower-growing, but they’re our favorites,” Nguyen says. “The bark is gnarled and displays amazing character.” A 14-foot-high earthen berm that curves around the back of the house provides privacy from the road.

Family life is oriented around a long concrete counter that extends from the kitchen straight out through the front window and 15 feet beyond, over the ipe wood deck.

The Nguyens wanted a lot of open space and sparsely furnished interiors. “We kept paring back, making it smaller, simpler,” he says, comparing it to some of the high-end homes built in this area of western Maui. (The Ritz-Carlton Resort is only a mile and a half down the beach in Kapalua.) “Most people tend to overdo it out here, but it doesn’t have to look like a mega-mansion from Orange County.”
Materials are simple and raw: concrete floors, rammed-earth walls, exposed lumber, corrugated metal for the roof. The decks are made from ipe, a durable and sustainable hardwood from Brazil that doesn’t need to be treated with preservatives. “It’s not a show-off piece. You can just hose it down,” Kundig says.
The roofs are the first thing you notice about the house, these great umbrellas of corrugated metal with extra-deep overhangs to keep out sun and rain. “The eaves are so deep that you can sit outside and stay dry even during a torrential downpour,” Nguyen says. Hefty steel beams protect the roofs from hurricanes and earthquakes. They also do away with the need for supporting columns and allow for uninterrupted views from every room in the house.

The peaks of the roof and their broad slopes are based on the Dickey style of roof, which itself derives from traditional A-frame Hawaiian roofs that were naturally ventilated with openings on either side. This idea was updated and modernized in the ’20s and ’30s by the architect C.W. Dickey, who designed, among other projects, Pauli Hall at the Punahou School, President Obama’s alma mater. “We wanted to turbo charge Dickey’s concept,” says Kundig, who worked with a consultant in Toronto and tested a scale model of the house in a wind tunnel that simulated the trade winds of Maui. The architect then devised a series of “flip-up” vents, a bit like a factory roof, angled to maximize the effects of the breezes. Each roof is equipped with electrically controlled louvers that can be opened or closed depending on weather conditions. The multipeaked roofs can grab the trade winds for cooling. (The metal also heats up in the daytime, helping to ventilate the interiors by way of convection.)

Jacob (left) and Jackson Nguyen perch at the end of the concrete countertop. A small plot of grass surrounding the property’s pool gives way to native plantings.

The house is further cooled by massive, 18-inch-thick walls made from rammed earth. During the hottest part of the day, you can still feel the coolness of the night in the walls. And at night, they retain the day’s warmth. This is one of the only rammed-earth houses built in Hawaii, and using Maui earth as a building component is an environmental victory: There’s no trucking in, no imported toxins—it’s local and natural. Temporary wooden formworks were the first structures to be erected, and a mixture of the earth, clay, sand, Portland cement, natural pigments and other ingredients was poured in and pounded down by a hydraulic ramming machine. “It looked like Stonehenge with these monolithic masses standing in a field,” Nguyen recalls. The glacially slow process left horizontal striations in the walls that give them a sense of age and natural accretion. “The lines on the walls mark the team’s progress for the day,” Kundig says.

Transom windows allow natural light into the master bedroom.

The walls also serve as another kind of barrier. There’s no cell phone service inside the house. You have to walk onto the deck or up the road to get a signal. “We figured out it wasn’t the cellular service, it was the rammed earth,” Nguyen says, laughing. “Tom built a perfect escape from the digital grind.”
The pavilion to the west, what the Nguyens call “Motel 3,” has three small guest rooms, each with its own bathroom. The pavilion to the east has the master bedroom suite while the central pavilion contains the family living/dining area. (All three are linked by a narrow, glassed-in passageway, raised a foot or more above ground.) The main room expands outward and becomes a giant breezeway, open from the back to the front. “How do we make the house open up to this perfect place?” Kundig says. “You really want to open the dude up.” Custom-made glass-and-steel-framed walls tilt back on hydraulic lifts (by means of 20 pistons) like airplane hangar doors, so you fully experience the views and changing weather patterns on both the Mauka (mountain) side and the Makai (ocean) side. “When you sit inside, it feels like you’re outside,” Nguyen says. “It’s a sophisticated form of camping.”
“Working from Maui is wonderful,” says Nguyen, who can’t escape Silicon Valley entirely. “You can sit on the deck and make calls while watching whales.” Now he’s in the kitchen, making lunch for his sons and cleaning up. His wife is off skiing in Lake Tahoe and there are no nannies or maids in sight. There’s a simple seating area to one side of the central pavilion—daybed, coffee table and chairs—but the central axis of family living is a massive counter top of smooth concrete that extends the length of the kitchen (about 18 feet) and cantilevers out the front of the house like an immense diving board.
“Why can’t a table stick out through a window?” Kundig says. “It’s a community gathering place. I’ve been wanting to do a table like that for a long time.” Even when the front wall is closed, this hyper-extended counter juts through the glass facade another 15 feet, almost as if it’s riding the house, like a surfboard rides a wave.
http://magazine.wsj.com/features/a-house-garden/la-la-land/3/