Original subtitles

[music playing]

GRAHAM HART: I kind of became a little bit obsessed about,

like, where is this thing?

As an architect and a nerd about Ossipoff's work,

it became this mythological beast that I was hunting

for, you know, maybe a decade.

So we came up here and went to the hiking trail,

and then on the way down, we're like,

is that-- is that the cabin, by the way?

Like, oh, yeah, we've got a bunch of cabins up here.

Yeah, but is that the Ossipoff cabin?

[music playing]

LIZA RYAN GILL: Whether, you know,

it's the drive up here and the anticipation

or the surprise of the view, the moment that you get up here,

kind of doesn't matter what else is going on.

It just makes you stop.

[music playing]

Vladimir Ossipoff is probably our most

famous architect out of Hawaii.

He's Russian-born but actually grew up mostly in Japan.

He's created a lot of buildings that are really

iconic on the island of Oahu.

And so this place is unique because most

of all of those other homes are places

that he built for people, but this

is what he built for himself.

In Hawaiian, we would say kuleana.

It means your role or your responsibility.

And so my kuleana is to take care of this place,

to enjoy it, to manage it, to make sure

that it is properly maintained.

We've been here since 2019, and during that time,

uncle Gary was slowly bringing the outside

and the tougher bits of this place back to life

and restoring them.

I'm Gary Gill, a member of the Gill Ewa Lands' ownership

of 1,600 acres on this mountain, which

includes the land around this cabin and the cabin itself.

[music playing]

GRAHAM HART: When you look at tropical modernists

and architecture from around the world, Ossipoff is probably,

you know, in the top dozen.

At the time, they hadn't started restoration work yet

or anything.

I wanted to help out in any way that I could.

As an architect and academic, I could help them

by digging in the archives and connecting

them with any drawings that there

was in Ossipoff's collection.

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LIZA RYAN GILL: We're technically

the most isolated part of Oahu.

GRAHAM HART: You could think about Ossipoff's architecture

responding to the natural world and the site

and the ecology and the climate to Hawaii.

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There's these spaces that he takes from his childhood

in Japan and reinterprets them and kind of makes them his own,

and makes them more unique and more practical for Hawaii.

GARY GILL: This was a labor of love.

Ossipoff personally did a lot of the construction

with family members or some of his coworkers.

And so they built it by hand on their own.

LIZA RYAN GILL: A couple of years

after this one was finished, they

decided to build a little guest cabin right next to it.

So we consider it all one kind of entity,

but technically, there are two cabins.

It's so well-designed and organized

that every space feels really intentional and flows nicely,

and there's always a great breeze.

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And you walk in and then you just have this expansive view

of giant glass windows and doors and a little L-shaped low couch

and our seagrass mats.

I love this punee.

In Hawaii, it's, like, just a day bed.

So it's kind of like a low couch.

It's kind of like having a bed that is in a common space.

[music playing]

GRAHAM HART: I love the levels and simple change

from the living room to the bedroom space.

LIZA RYAN GILL: Something very quintessential about Ossipoff

is that there are, like, 12 doors for every door.

And so you open the outside whether shutters, and then

the shoji, and then the screens.

So you gotta open all the doors in layers.

They kind of look like little dominoes,

and the door pulls on the shoji screens,

you actually know which one is supposed to go where

because it goes one, two, three.

GRAHAM HART: So there's multiple iterations of how it was built

and how long it took.

LIZA RYAN GILL: During the restoration,

we were working with Vladimir's children and grandchildren

and their close family friends that spent a lot of time here.

GARY GILL: We basically had photographs

from a 1960s of what this place looked like then,

and that was our template to try and restore it to that period.

We tried to basically empty it out,

just scrub it out to the bones, all

the furniture, all the stuff that was packed everywhere.

GRAHAM HART: Everything on the inside has been sanded down

and refinished, and, you know, beeswax put on the walls

to reclaim it.

Shoji panels had to be remade.

Doors and windows had to be reframed.

All the interior furnishings and materials had to be found again

and, you know, are made new.

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GARY GILL: This structure harks back to a simpler time.

How this thing stands is a testament

to innovative architecture and minimalism.

How much can you get away with not putting in?

And it's stood here and withstood the elements

for half a century.

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GRAHAM HART: Good architecture, you hear,

does the least amount.

This cabin, it's very open to the environment.

LIZA RYAN GILL: So you walk into the kind of center courtyard,

and we have a little kitchen area outside,

and then the little deck, we would say

a little lanai, on the front.

GRAHAM HART: This walkway on the outside of the cabin

is a Japanese space called the engawa, which basically means,

like, the space in between.

It's in between indoors and in between outdoors.

And it's great to have this overhang and this kind of way

to blend and blur the boundary between in and out.

But practically, it also helps protect the facade, right?

So the rain doesn't get in.

The sunshine doesn't come in as much.

And you can leave the whole space open in a rainstorm,

and it's a protected space.

LIZA RYAN GILL: It's kind of Japan meets Hawaii in the '60s

on top of a mountain.

[music playing]

Who needs walls?

You don't really need walls.

Like, you just need a roof.

That's what you really need in Hawaii.

[music playing]

Right now, we're sitting here, and, well, 3/4 of the cabin

is open.

And it feels great.

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You only really need them if there's,

like, bad weather coming in.

And so for the whole back side of the cabin,

the entrance area, they can just go away if you don't want them.

There's also this incorporation of reclaimed lumber.

You know, things that look like they

were just cut directly from outside,

and it's because they were.

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This cabin was kind of built oriented towards the sunset.

The light from, like, 4:30 to 6:30, that makes everything

look like it was dipped in honey, and that kind of just

requires you to stop whatever you are doing and enjoy it.

[music playing]

Our daughter, she's been up here every three or four

days of her short 18 months.

To basically, like, learn to walk in this cabin.

Because we were up here all the time as we

were finishing the restoration and spending

time with our friends.

I get to look out on these beautiful mountains

and just feel blessed by this space.

You know, that twin lightness of being awed by some things

beauty, but also the gentle heaviness of knowing that it's

your job to care for it.

There can be a temptation to preserve something

and cover it in clear plastic.

And these places need to be living, or else they die.

And so it needs that constant touch

and needs regular love and attention.

[music playing]

GARY GILL: When you recognize how special Hawaii is, and you

have it in your heart, you want to protect it,

and so that is our mission.

Not everything is exactly how it used to be,

but it's really close.

And it's reflective, as close as we could get, to the way

that Ossipoff himself wanted it to be.

[music playing]

Even if it weren't designed by Ossipoff, just the location,

proximity to the view, and the sunset,

there is no place like it on the planet.

Right?

There's no place like Hawaii on the planet,

and within Hawaii, there's no place like this.

[music playing]