Love Falls for the Lindbergh Estate

Along with the sounds of Hauoli Makahiki Hou, Hawaiian for Happy New Year, come these island items. From Maui:

MIKE LOVE of the Beach Boys has purchased the home of CHARLES and ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH.

Love bought the 5-acre estate, down a twisting, scenic road a few miles from the remote village of Hana, from the aviator’s widow for about $1 million, said a Maui realty source. The property had been listed at $1.5 million.

Love also owns a 14-acre adjacent site and house, which he purchased a couple years ago from the estate of SAM PRYOR, who was a longtime friend of the Lindberghs, for $1.25 million, the source said. “Love got a steal on that property,” he added.

Pryor, a pioneer aviation industrialist who helped arrange the financing for Charles Lindbergh’s historic solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, and his wife bought their island home before the Lindberghs bought theirs. The Lindberghs liked the Pryors’ place so much, they bought the site next door for a vacation home, which they enjoyed for many years.

Charles Lindbergh died in 1974, Pryor died in 1985. The two men and Pryor’s wife are buried in a graveyard that they cleared by hand. The cemetery is beside the Kipahulu Hawaiian church, near Love’s property.

After Love added the Lindbergh home to his earlier acquisition, neighboring residents voiced concern that he might build condominiums there, but realty sources said there is little likelihood of that happening because of the zoning and limited water supply. Love is vacationing in Australia and unavailable for comment.

Hotel Hana-Maui and its 4,700-acre ranch, both in Hana (population: 1,000), have been sold to a group of 13 investors from Hawaii, Japan and London.

Sekitei Kaihatsu Co. Ltd. gave up its option to buy the 97-room hotel and ranch with the understanding that it could assume their management when Rosewood Property Co.’s contract expires in June.

Rosewood, which represents oil heiress Caroline Hunt Schoellkopf, owned both the Maui property and the 92-room Hotel Bel-Air, which it sold in May to Sekitei Kaihatsu for more than $100 million, or a record per-room price of $1.2 million. Purchase price of the Hana hotel and ranch was not disclosed, but Honolulu real estate sources estimated it at $75 million.

Hotel Hana-Maui dates back to the ‘40s, when the sugar-cane industry, which had flourished there from the 1800s, was on the wane.

San Francisco entrepreneur Paul Fagan turned the fields that once produced cane into pasture land when he established his Hana Ranch, and about the same time, he opened the Hotel Hana-Maui, where his San Francisco Seals baseball team came for spring training.

Rosewood bought the property in 1984 and recently completed a $24-million renovation, including the addition of several cottages and a health and fitness center. The new cottages, which have spas on the porches, and the health center overlook the Hana coastline.

The hotel also has two swimming pools, a tennis court, a three-hole golf course, horseback riding, jeep tours into the ranch lands and rain forest, and weekly cocktail parties for guests in the Plantation House, the former home of Hana’s first sugar plantation owner. Daily rates are $275-$750, and meals are $85 a day per person, or $45 a day per child ages 2-17.

On Kauai, actor SYLVESTER STALLONE finally got the polo field he has wanted for years. He just finished building it near his home at Anini Beach.

There wasn’t enough room to build the field at his Chatsworth horse ranch, where he is building what sources describe as “a huge ranch-style house out of real logs.”

The polo field is on property that Stallone purchased from the U.S. government, which had seized it in a drug case.

Next door to Stallone’s is a house that is being built by a Japanese electronics executive, with a sushi bar, a tatami room and an indoor stream. On the other side of that house is an oceanfront lot that is listed with Harrington’s Paradise Cos. in Hanalei at $1.5 million.

Also on Kauai, former Laker KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR just finished building the lighted tennis court that Laker owner Jerry Buss gave him as a retirement gift.

Abdul-Jabbar built the court at his plantation-style house in Kiluea.

The longtime basketball star has owned the vacation home for some time, but since his retirement a few months ago, he has become something of a neighborhood busybody, area residents complain.

One said, “He went to the health department to stop a cattle rancher from burning grass, turned in another fellow for cutting down some trees, and even gave (Sylvester) Stallone some trouble over not clearing away some (construction) rubble.”

On Oahu, actor JOHN HILLERMAN sold his Honolulu penthouse in mid-December for nearly $3 million.

He put the 38th-floor, 3,500-square-foot unit on the market last summer after using it as his main residence for eight years while co-starring with Tom Selleck in the TV series “Magnum P.I.”

By phone from his house at Lake Arrowhead, Hillerman said he plans to go to England in February to make a movie with Edward Woodward about Sherlock Holmes, and he is also planning to do a series, but he can’t discuss the details yet.