Doris Duke'sShangri-la

Honolulu as a city did not really interest us terribly and we wondered what we might best do while there for our one day, other than sit on Waikiki beach and drink Mai Tais (not that there’s anything wrong with that). The sister of a close friend of mine was effusive about a place, affiliated with the Honolulu Museum of Art, a museum in a private house, which intrigued us, so we booked tickets a few weeks before we left home, and here we are. Shangri-la!

The place was one of the several homes American heiress Doris Duke built, this one for herself. Her short marriage to a considerably older man broke up when he expressed his desire to join the political world, and she did not. But what the marriage had provided her with was an extended honeymoon throughout much of the world, and an introduction to the art of Islam.

This was not religious art per se, but artistic interpretation of the spread of Islam from Morocco to Indonesia, and all points in between. She started collecting pieces as she found them, or as they were being sold off. In the earlier years of the 20^th century, antiquities were sold off without compunction, and Doris was able to get in there at just the right time it seems, as old buildings were being torn down, and before the larger museums caught wind of it.

She herself designed and organized the building of this house, on a raised curve of water beyond the bulk of Diamond Head, the Table Mountain of Honolulu as it were. Doris, whose father had amassed a fortune through tobacco and hydro-electric power and passed it on to her when he died, had been close to her dear old dad, and mourned his loss when she was the tender age of 12. Her mother was a socialite, a “lady who lunched”, and not at all the sort of woman Doris sought to become. She took her father’s fortune and increased it substantially, while also bestowing gifts to various charities and foundations, but with a ‘teach a man to fish’ mentality. She loved gospel music, so donated organs to poor churches. She loved horses and dogs, so funded a school of veterinary medicine at Duke University, another family legacy.

But Islamic art and Hawai’i became passions, and she constructed a house that included many of the elements she had seen on her honeymoon travels: pools, pavilions, sliding screens, tiled floors, paved courtyards and gardens, and she filled the place with the treasures she had bought: heavy wooden furniture from Moorish Spain, lighting from Egypt, tiling from Turkey and Armenia, inlaid chests from Syria, glazed pottery from Persia, carved ivory and gem studded jewellery from India; things from all over the Islamic world.

Spending winters in Hawai’i she was allowed to live as just another person, albeit a rich, white, female person. She swam with her 12 German shepherd dogs every day, surfed, learned how to play the ukulele and took part in the community, not as a celebrity but as a keen and active resident. Not having an heir herself, she set up a foundation that would provide for the upkeep of the house in perpetuity and left it all to the Museum of Honolulu, which, after she died in 1993, invited Christies to assess whether there was anything of real value in the collection. The report revealed that Doris had created the largest and most valuable collection of Islamic art in the entire country.



the striking Doris Duke

Now visitors can book to visit, 25 at a time, shuttled from the downtown Museum of Art to this quiet residential neighbourhood, and then take a 90 minute tour of the house. Looking out at the aquamarine coloured surf, one could just imagine Doris Duke her sitting on her shaded patio looking out to sea, or lounging in her cream bedroom with its sliding screens and inlaid marble, or welcoming her robust herd of dogs in her enormous pavilion-styled living room, with its carved ceiling and floor-to-ceiling wall of windows that could be lowered completely, into the cellar below. It is an exotic, airy, peaceful space.

We returned to the Museum, which itself is lovely, designed by New York architect Bertram Goodhue in the early 1920s, and then completed by Hardie Philip. It is open and airy as well, with courtyards connected to the rooms of art that surround them: Chinese; Mediterranean; Kinau. We ended up spending the rest of the day there, and had our Mai Tais on board the ship as we left port instead. We can sit on a beach anytime.