Kapiwai subdivision near Downtown Honolulu to feature luxury homes, sustainability

Mar 5, 2014, 2:31pm HST UPDATED: Mar 5, 2014, 3:17pm HST
Kapiwai subdivision near Downtown Honolulu to feature luxury homes, sustainability

Duane Shimogawa Reporter – Pacific Business News

This rendering shows one of the homes planned for the Kapiwai project in Pauoa, near Downtown Honolulu.

A Honolulu attorney who’s represented some of Hawaii’s largest hotel, resort and commercial landowners is leading a local hui of investors who are developing a community of 24 homes priced at an average of $1.6 million each in Honolulu’s lush Pauoa Valley that will include open space and a nonprofit component focusing on sustainability.

Located at the end of Booth Road, Kapiwai, which is being marketed to potential buyers as having the chance to live near Downtown Honolulu while being close to nature, with opportunities to grow a garden, restore an auwai or a water channel for irrigation and catch crayfish in the stream, will be built atop a ridge overlooking a stream.

Barry Sullivan, partner with Bickerton Lee Dang Sullivan Meheula, is working with the newly formed Schatz Clifford LLC sustainable development firm, which is headed up by Linda Schatz, a former development manager for Kamehameha Schools and wife of U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, and Janine Clifford, president of Honolulu-based Clifford Planning & Architecture, on the new 15-acre development.

Sullivan, the managing member of Pauoa Valley Preserve LLC, the owner and developer of the project, said that the property is zoned for 137 units.

The property, which Sullivan and other investors bought in 2004 from an Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society out of North Dakota, has been fallow for three decades. The church once had plans to build a 141-unit senior housing facility and a 106-bed assisted-living facility on the property, he said.

Sullivan, who declined to disclose the cost of developing the project, said that it’s very much a legacy project for himself and others involved.

“It’s something that was very carefully planned out,” he said. “It’s going to be a community that people are going to want to live in, a very vibrant place.”

Linda Schatz, the project manager, told PBN that only about half of the 15 acres will be developed into homes, ranging from 1,600 square feet to 2,400 square feet with the average size of each home site at 11,000 square feet.

The other seven acres will be kept for a preserve of gardens that will be protected from future development and will be run by Kapiwai Gardens LLC. The new nonprofit will be seeded with funds from the project sales and homeowners will have access rights to and across the gardens with the intent to slowly work to restore the grounds.

There are also plans to build a new 100,000 gallon reservoir on the property for the Board of Water Supply, which will service Pauoa neighborhoods downstream of the reservoir, including Kapiwai.

“Projects now have to look at the triple bottom line,” Linda Schatz said. “There are more projects out there in Hawaii like this.”

Ironically, Linda Schatz and Clifford got together during the beginning stages of the Kapiwai proejct, which eventually led to the creation of the new firm.

Kapiwai will be designed by renowned architects Joel Turkel of Turkel Design and Mark de Reus of de Reus Architects. Kauai-based Unlimited Construction is the general contractor.