Legacy of grand La Pietra home now includes art and education

There are very few mansions left that belonged to Hawaii’s early-day moguls — that handful of business people who became very rich from various commercial activities.

For the few elaborate properties that remain, most have been adapted for public use such as the wonderful Shipman House in Hilo that is now a bed and breakfast. The Cooke-Spalding home in Makiki is now part of the Honolulu Museum of Art. .

Kuali‘i in Manoa is a special case. While the large house is still used as a private residence for the Cooke family, it will eventually be part of the 3-acre Manoa Heritage Center gifted to the community by the late Samuel and Mary Cooke.

Perhaps the most splendid of all is the gracious La Pietra on the slopes of Diamond Head, built by Walter and Louise Dillingham in 1922. It is not only gracious, but sizable at about 20,000 square feet. How it got there, how it was designed as an Italian villa, how it was saved and what it is today is an interesting preservation story.

Young Louise Gaylord from Chicago was on an around-the-world tour when she stopped in Honolulu. At one of the frequent grand parties given by the Honolulu elite in those days, she met Walter Dillingham, whose family was among Hawaii’s 1 percent.

A few years later Walter and Louise married and went to Italy for their honeymoon. There they stayed in the 600-year-old villa called La Pietra/Florence that belonged to Louise’s aunt. That visit inspired Louise to return to Honolulu with a notion to eventually create an Italian villa patterned after, but not duplicative of, the villa in Italy. With that vision in mind, she and Walter hired the noted Chicago architect David Adler to design their La Pietra in Honolulu.

Walter Dillingham’s motivation for purchasing the land and hiring Adler was his wife’s restlessness in the Dillingham mansion on Beretania, which is the site of the present-day Central Union Church.

Apparently she wanted something much grander and less confining than the family mansion. A 10-acre site on the slopes of Diamond Head — on the eastern flank of Kapiolani Park — that had once belonged to King Lunalilo was chosen.

With Adler’s help, the Dillinghams indeed got something very majestic in their La Pietra. The adjectives naturally flow: the Italian-influenced design is splendid; the grounds are baronial; the interiors are stately.

The main building had five large public rooms around a splendid courtyard and two bedrooms downstairs (plus the necessary utilitarian functions of a kitchen, pantry, laundry, vault and cloakroom). On the second floor were eight bedrooms, a sitting room and a screened sleeping porch.

The place was grand enough to draw high-profile guests such as Franklin Roosevelt; Herbert Hoover; Edward, prince of Wales; the crown prince and princess of Sweden; Nelson Rockefeller, W. Averell Harriman; and Anthony Eden. A few of the entertainers who dropped by were Bing Crosby, Will Rogers, Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Eddie Duchin and Walt Disney. Numerous religious and military luminaries were also present at various times.

But all this splendor came to an end after both the Dillinghams died in mid-1960, at which time their wills made two huge gifts. First, La Pietra, the building and 5 acres, was given to Punahou School, and second, hundreds of movable pots, vases, statuary, furnishings and art were given to the then-Honolulu Academy of Art. The academy kept what it wanted. What remained was so vast it took five days to auction it all off.

The interconnectivity of Honolulu must be noted in this scenario. The elder Dillinghams gave their property on Beretania to Central Union Church, where it stands today. The Hawaii School for Girls was established in 1964 and was housed in cramped quarters on the Central Union campus. Recognizing it had to move, ambitious parents along with notables Lorraine Cooke and Barbara Cox Anthony, with the help of succeeding Dillingham family members, put together $1 million and bought the villa and 5 acres from Punahou School.

Jack Gillmar, who spent 33 years at Hawaii School for Girls as a teacher, interim headmaster and restorer, said they faced several huge challenges once the acquisition was made. First was to address the deterioration that had taken place among the buildings and grounds over many years. Second was to adapt the buildings and grounds for school use while preserving the total character of the place. And third, in the interest of full preservation, was to ask the community to return as much of the auctioned interior and exterior furnishings as possible.

Gillmar says present-day La Pietra “remains a monument to the sensibilities of its creators, a beautiful structure on the most commanding site of Diamond Head.”

One big question remains. Considering the splendid residences that the Cookes, Waterhouses, Shipmans, Dillinghams and Castles left behind, will we see that same legacy from present-day Honolulu moguls, the men and women who are rich or getting rich in Hawaii today?

CORRECTION: An earlier version included Robert M. Fox as a co-author.

Keep Hawaii Hawaii is a monthly column on island architecture and urban planning. Robert M. Fox, president of Fox Hawaii Inc., studied architecture in California and Japan. He was one of the founders of the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation in 1974. David Cheever, owner of David Cheever Marketing, has served on the boards of the Historic Hawai‘i Foundation and the Hawaii Architectural Foundation. Send comments to keephawaiiawaii@staradvertiser.com.