Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.

Parker Ranch
to put homes
on the range

The Holoholo Ku condo
development is expected to
be completed next year

By Russ Lynch
Star-Bulletin

The long-planned development of small pieces of Parker Ranch land at Waimea on the Big Island is about to begin with a fee-simple, single-family condominium home project put together by Honolulu developers U.J. "Rick" Rainalter and John P. Spierling.

Called Holoholo Ku, the 44-home development will be the first step in what Richard Smart, the Parker Ranch owner who died in late 1992, conceived of in 1986.

Smart's "2020 plan" was designed to provide enough ranch land for the town to grow through the year 2020, said Melvin B. Hewett, one of the three trustees of the nonprofit foundation set up by Parker Ranch. The plan calls for the development of about 730 homes.

The Parker Ranch Foundation Trust holds the land set aside for small developments, some residential and some small-industry and community projects, Hewett said. Its aim is to use orderly development to generate income for community purposes such as preserving the area's heritage and helping schools.

"Holoholo Ku is the first development of the whole 2020 plan," Hewett said. "It is located right in a very important historic area of the ranch," he said.

It is designed to reflect that history, in a pasture area that features rock walls and the old buildings preserved as the ranch's "Heritage Area."

The developers expect to start construction by the end of this year and have the $15 million project complete by mid-2001.

Founded in 1847 by New England seaman John Palmer Parker, the ranch has roughly 230,000 acres and 30,000 head of cattle. But the ranch, one of the nation's largest, also has been diversifying in recent years through tourism -- its visitor center, museum and other attractions bring in about 80,000 tourists a year -- and development plans.

Rainalter said his partnership with Spierling, called Kamuela Associates LLC, brought in Group 70 International Inc.'s architects Francis S. Oda and Hitoshi Hida, known for The Lodge at Koele on Lanai and other local projects, to come up with the design.

"We got our choice of acreage," Rainalter said.

Group 70 proposed fingers of development reaching out into the pasture with each finger surrounded by pasture land, on a slope with views of Mauna Kea and the Kohala mountains. The design went so far as to call for a rezoning back to pasture land for some acres that had been rated residential, so that each of the structures would be surrounded by grassland, Rainalter said.

"The long-term value will be in keeping those things that made the area individual," he said.

"The original design was for 15 large buildings," as multi-family condominiums, but market testing quickly showed that wasn't what people wanted, Rainalter said.

The project was redesigned as 15 separate "enclaves" off a single entry road, with each enclave consisting of a small group of cottages.

The project calls for 28 two-story cottages, each standing alone with their own grounds and selling for between about $265,000 and $305,000. The targeted market is Oahu buyers of second homes.

The project also includes 16 larger ranch houses, with prices ranging from just under $400,000 to about $470,000 and designed to appeal to owners outside Oahu.

The condominium approach, the developers said, allows for preservation and year-round maintenance and the fees to the condo association, averaging $294 a month, will make that possible, Rainalter said.

Spierling said an additional feature that will help attract vacation-home buyers is a "concierge" service that the homeowners' association will provide.

Individual owners will pay for what they use, such as having maintenance personnel get the owner's car washed, pulling steaks out of the unit's freezer in advance of the owner's visit, or arranging a ride from the airport.