A contemporary mansion offering waterfront views and channeling good “mana” Hawaiian spirit has been announced as The Wall Street Journal readers’ choice for house of the year. The home is on the market for $21 million, listed with Ruthie Kaminskas of Elite Pacific Properties.
This is the second consecutive year that a Hawaiian property has nabbed WSJ’s “House of the Year” crown.
Each year, WSJ readers are asked to select their favorite home from 52 featured “House of the Week” properties over the past year. More than 133,000 votes were cast in this year’s poll to select the “2019 House of the Year.”
The home,located in Lanikai (a neighborhood on Oahu), features a 7,465-square-foot main home that offers sweeping views of 151 feet of private waterfront as well as the Mokulua islands. The main residence is just one room wide to “make sure that every space has a relationship to the ocean, to the lagoon, to the Mokululas,” Jim Jennings, the Bay Area architect who was hired to design the home, told The Wall Street Journal.
The home also features movable screens and large lanais for indoor-outdoor living.
“It’s how the home can open up and take advantage of the climate,” Jennings told WSJ. “It’s the sense of space, and the way there’s a relationship always to the sound and the swaying of the palm trees and the local vegetation. It’s all part of the same dance.” The current owners and architect sought to achieve good “mana” design with the home—a Hawaiian term that means spiritual energy and power.
The property also features a 1,877-square-foot, four-bedroom, four-bathroom guesthouse and a one-bedroom caretaker’s cottage.
