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.
“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.
While the new guesthouse has obvious connections to the first residence in form, siting, and the handling of light, Warner describes the difference between the two in terms of the raw and the cooked. “The DNA is the same, but like all siblings they don’t have precisely the same character,” explains the architect, who was joined on the project by associate principal Amadeo Bennetta and job captain John Sydnor. “The original house we designed has a high level of rigor and detail; it’s fully buttoned up. The guest quarters, which don’t have such a heavy lift as far as program, are more casual, a bit rougher, more playful.” As one example, he points to the canopies that shade the breezeways at the two locations: The one at the main house is a taut construction of perforated bronze, while the guesthouse walkways and patios are shaded by canopies of coarse eucalyptus twigs. “The new structure is more like a camp, meant to be open and breathe,” Warner adds.
Having worked with the homeowner for more than a decade, Leverone was intimately familiar with her penchant for the tactile, the sculptural, and the handmade. “She likes furniture that tells you something about the person who made it—beautiful, organic things that you’re meant to live on,” the designer notes. Consider the medley of forms and textures in the house’s main living room. The space is anchored by a hefty Rogan Gregory cocktail table fashioned from bleached maple burl wood, accompanied by a Gregory lounge chair that utilizes alder wood and a massive sofa covered in sheepskin. Vintage Swedish chairs covered in shearling buoy the textural symphony, as does a felicitous woven swinging chair created by Patricia Urquiola for Louis Vuitton’s Objets Nomades program. “That’s my mom’s throne,” the homeowner says of the bold Urquiola piece. “She’s the matriarch of our clan, and that’s where she presides.”
Specially commissioned furnishings pepper the rest of the house as well. The kitchen adjacent to the living room features a shapely pendant light hewn from a fallen tree by British designer Nic Webb. Gareth Neal, another English designer whose practice focuses on the organic and handmade, contributed a wardrobe with doors of oak and handwoven straw. “The client is so emotionally invested in every detail, every decision. These pieces speak to her—they’re part of her,” Leverone insists.
In a house full of surprises, one of the most unexpected encounters is a vintage Airstream trailer parked in a secret garden at the far end of the site. Improbably tricked-out in mohair, alpaca, suede, and hair-on-hide, with a host of midcentury treasures by the likes of Charlotte Perriand and Evelyn Ackerman, the trailer puts a delightfully madcap spin on the Airstream’s machined aesthetic. Leverone recalls his client showing up to design meetings with copies of The Jungle Book and Where the Wild Things Are to set the appropriate tone for the experience. “The garden is like a reward for exploring,” the designer says. “It puts a happy punctuation point on the property.”
In essence, that spirit of wonder and delight gets to the heart of the entire guesthouse enterprise. “I love the sensation of a little kid discovering something amazing, a tiny world of your own creation,” the homeowner concludes. “That’s the magic of design.”
This Maui guesthouse project is featured in AD’s July/August issue. Never miss a story when you subscribe to AD.
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