Building 2 Lanai Hotels : Hawaii Calling Murdock

Multimillionaire developer and business tycoon David Murdock, who rarely has agreed to be interviewed, sat a few days ago in his sumptuous Westwood offices and talked about his latest projects, especially in Hawaii.

His Murdock Development Co. is putting the finishing touches on a $100-million, mixed-use Baltimore project known as Harbor Court, and he and his firm contributed design, administrative and construction-management services to UCLA for its $15-million Fowler Museum of Cultural History, expected to be under construction in July.

It was, however, Lanai, which prompted the most remarks.

Lanai is the sleepy, mostly undeveloped Hawaiian island where one of Murdock’s companies announced Thursday that it will develop two luxury hotels.

Second Largest Landowner

The company, Oceanic Properties, is a subsidiary of the 136-year-old Castle & Cooke Inc., which Murdock took over as major shareholder, chairman and chief executive officer in 1985.

Castle & Cooke had revenues last year of $1.74 billion. Its Hawaiian holdings amount to about 150,000 acres, making it the second largest private landowner in Hawaii. The largest is the Bishop Estate.

Castle & Cooke owns 88,700 acres, or 98%, of Lanai, which until now has been known for its pineapples, distributed under the Dole label. Dole Food Co. is also a subsidiary of Castle & Cooke.

“We have 16,000 acres of the finest pineapples in the world under cultivation, and you can quote me on that,” Murdock said with a smile.

Since December, singer Kenny Rogers has been the Dole company spokesman, and he and his wife, Marianne, and son are being featured in much of the firm’s current $100-million advertising and marketing campaign. It’s Rogers’ first product endorsement, a fact that obviously delights Murdock, who looks upon Rogers and Rogers’ family as friends.

Principal Home in Bel-Air

Besides building a couple of hotels on Lanai, Murdock will build a home there for himself--”an Asian house with a sculpture gallery, skylights and an atrium”--in a 17-home compound reserved for himself and his friends--”Kenny and Marianne included.”

Murdock’s home won’t be his principal residence. His principal residence is the fabulous Bel-Air mansion once owned by the late hotel-magnate Conrad Hilton. Murdock’s Lanai house will be smaller, but it will have five bedrooms.

“People might wonder why, when I don’t even have a wife, but the bedrooms will be for friends and family,” he said. Murdock, 64, has two teen-aged sons.

His wife, Gabrielle, died of cancer about two years ago. She decorated Washington’s venerable Hay-Adams Hotel, which Murdock bought in 1983, and had begun to plan the interiors of the Harbor Court Hotel.

Arnold Savrann, the chief architect for Harbor Court who also designed UCLA’s Fowler Museum in association with John Carl Warnecke & Associates and is a vice president of Oceanic Properties and Murdock Development, said Joszi Meskan of San Francisco completed the Harbor Court interiors “in the spirit of Mrs. Murdock’s taste, judgment and style.”

Murdock says his Lanai home will not be extravagant, and the compound, hotels and new housing for employees will occupy only a small part of the island, which is the sixth largest in the Hawaiian chain. Lanai is 13 miles wide by 18 miles long and has 98,400 acres. The hotels will be on two sites, totaling 47 acres.

Murdock intends to maintain most of the island for walking, horseback riding, hunting and other outdoor activities. The hotels also will offer tennis, golf, croquet and bowling on the green.

Keep It Underdeveloped

“We’ll keep the island basically underdeveloped,” he said. Like Catalina? “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

Lanai has long been a place to fish and hunt, but Murdock, who raises Arabian horses and Santa Gertrudis cattle at his Ventura Farms, said, “I can’t kill anything.”

Savrann also appreciates animals. Besides designing 26 hotels, 14 of which have been built, and a number of office and other buildings as well as the Kennedy Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, Savrann paints 30-by-40-inch canvases, which he sells for about $10,000 apiece. His subjects are elephants, giraffes, jaguars and other game he has seen in Africa.

Lanai has wild deer, long-horn sheep, quail, turkey, pheasant, partridge and grouse.

Varied Terrain

“It’s supposed to have the best snorkeling and fishing in the world,” Murdock said, “and Lanai is also where you can see the hump-backed whales raise their babies.”

Its terrain is varied, with tropical forests, small mountains, grasslands and pines. “The island has thousands of 100-foot-tall pine trees planted 70 to 80 years ago,” Murdock said.

Savrann added, “We’re building (one hotel) around the oldest pine on the island. That tree is about 100 years old.” Savrann and Group 70 of Honolulu, with Francis S. Oda as partner in charge, designed both of the planned hotels.

Expected to be under way in July, the Manele Bay Hotel will have 250 rooms and suites and will be located on a sandy beach when completed in August, 1989. It was designed in the Kamaaina style of traditional Hawaiian architecture, typified by great sloping roofs, arcaded loggias and lush gardens.

Mountain Retreat

Due to be under construction in June, the 102-room Lodge at Koele will be built as a mountain retreat in the Highlands of Koele. Opening date: October, 1988.

It was designed with high, beamed ceilings and natural stone fireplaces to look like a grand private home, rich with objets d’art and artifacts of the Pacific. Murdock said, “I’ve been actively buying art and antiques from the Pacific Basin for the hotel for 1 1/2 years now.”

Murdock knows antiques. He has owned Stair & Co., a famous antique company with offices in New York and London, since 1979.

“We’ll serve food that is healthy, so people will understand what is good for them to eat,” he continued.

Created Regency Club

Murdock knows food. In 1981, he created the Regency Club, a private and very elegant dining facility above his 16th-floor headquarters, and it serves some of the finest meals in Los Angeles.

Murdock says he’ll also “re-invent the Aloha shirt” as something for his hotel guests to buy.

Murdock knows textiles. He owned Cannon Mills from 1982 until about a year ago.

Murdock is spending more than $100 million on his Lanai projects, which also include new roads and airport improvements. “We have a 6,000-foot-long runway there now that will take good-sized planes,” Murdock said.

Rebuilding the Town

“I fly my Falcon 50, a three-engine jet, right in there.” That’s a French-made Dassault-Breguet Falcon 50 that seats eight to nine people and cruises at 540 m.p.h.

“We’re also rebuilding the little town that’s there, much as we did in Kannapolis.”

Kannapolis, N. C., also known as the City of Looms, was founded in 1906 as a result of the expansion of Cannon Manufacturing Co., and the town grew up around the mill.

Savrann, architect for the Cannon Village (Kannapolis downtown) master plan, said, “We took the remnants of the mill town and restored and renovated about 42 buildings at last count.

‘A Teeny Town’

“We invited the people, senior citizens who had been good millworkers, to participate. Mr. Murdock said, ‘Come on, get active, help build the buildings.’ And they did.” Murdock has invested an estimated $20 million to $30 million there so far.

The story will be much the same in Lanai City, which Murdock describes as “a teeny town, two blocks wide and two blocks long.”

Murdock is already “redoing it, building some new old buildings,” as he puts it, in keeping with the town’s character.

And on the edge of the community, he’s building some tennis courts, a competition swimming pool, archery range, shuffleboard court, softball fields and running tracks.

Senior Citizens Center

A senior citizens center with meeting rooms is under construction and scheduled for completion in September. “It’s a gift to the town,” Savrann said.

Lanai has a population of about 2,200. Among these are about 15 retirees from the Mainland, Murdock said, but the rest either work or worked for Dole.

Few tourists have stayed on Lanai. There has been only one hotel , the 11-room Hotel Lanai where , for $53 a night , travelers could get a tiny, twin-bedded room that a travel writer recently guessed hadn’t changed a lot since the hotel opened in 1927.

Murdock has started refurbishing it, and the rates undoubtedly will go up but not as high as the new hotels, which will be, Savrann said, on a par with the Hotel Hana-Maui at Hana Ranch, where doubles range from $335 to $475 a day , including meals .

‘Upscale Developments’

The travel writer who stayed recently at the Hotel Lanai wrote of the island:

“It seems doubtful that tourists will be eager to fly 30 minutes (from Maui) to a place with little to see and less to do.” He also questioned how much business the new Lanai hotels might do when there are already so many hotels and condos for tourists in Hawaii.

Murdock calls his planned Lanai hotels “upscale developments.” For the rich and famous? He chuckled. “I can’t say that.”

As for little to do, he said, “We’re nine miles removed from Maui for those who want more night life, and we’ll have speed launches and a large boat that will go back and forth.” Even so, he acknowledged that Lanai will always be “for people who want to get away from it all.”

Archeological Sites

Or learn something about Hawaiian history. There are some archeological ruins on Lanai that Murdock describes as “the largest collection on the islands, because they were never disturbed.” He plans to rebuild King Kamehameha’s summer house and a village with 52 ancient houses. He’s also restoring a reservoir and a church.

What next? Murdock had hoped to build a hotel in Westwood on a site within walking distance of his headquarters and several new high rises, but after spending three years and about $600,000 on the idea, he met with resistance from the city and residents.

He hasn’t given up, but asked what he will develop after Lanai, just smiled. Then: “We only talk about what we’re doing.”