From the natural environment of my last blog now back to the built environment, I have to say this most recent of our two-score return trips to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was not without some trepidation. I’ll readily grant, the place was formerly more than somewhat dowdy, albeit in excellent repair, and it reminded me of going into my grandmother’s living room. Familiar, comfortable, shabby from long use, with anything inconvenient long-since gotten used to. And, everything within eyesight fraught with sentiment. I daresay, the design team involved with last year’s refit, doubtless aware that my sentiments matched those of many, many others, must have approached this project with a considerable degree of, shall we say, anxiety.
It was, then, with profound relief we discovered the masterful job Honolulu-based interior designers Philpotts & Associates performed. Actually, I should stress the ‘masterful’, because the designer was able to coordinate older, ineffectively wrought design elements- like the linking colonnade- and render them attractive and integral.
Along those lines, common areas of the hotel seldom used, like the Diamond Head portico with its vista on lawn and planting beds of cannas and torch ginger in Royal Hawaiian pink, are now welcoming- and used!
The refit has substantially altered the ground floor layout of the hotel, with a number of later accretions- small office and conference areas and function rooms- removed, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find restoring the ground floor to something closer to its original footprint. Frankly, I was a bit concerned about the fate of the lower lobby, with its vestiges of a long-ago scheme realized by Frances Elkins. But, of course, vestigial is all it formerly was because Elkins’ original design with comfortable seating and conversation areas had given way over the years to the lobby becoming little more than an inordinately wide hallway, 
with what little furniture the space contained all shoved along one wall. Here, again, the adjacent small Lurline room, a function room that was hardly larger than a closet, was removed allowing from the lower lobby a through vista to the beach.
Effectively updating the venerable always begs the cliché the best of the old and the new. Despite the prominent use of koa wood pieces of traditional motif. I’d have to say 
that the design for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is quite new, by which I mean though it has a quality of mimesis to render it intellectually comfortable it is distinctive and speaks for itself- and not just in the accents of an earlier day. And yet it seems to have always been there, as the design articulates perfectly with the corpus of the hotel, its surrounding gardens, and the beach.