[ BIG ISLAND HOME ]
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‘Big House’
The restored Hilo mansion
now serves as a B&B
HILO >> Passing by a new three-story Hilo mansion in 1900, Mary Shipman told her rancher husband, William Herbert Shipman, "Willie, buy me that house." Mary was motivated by more than whimsy. Living with the Shipmans were their seven surviving children -- three others had died -- plus Willie's mother and her brother. They needed more space.
Willie pretended to ignore his wife until they went by the house a year later. Then he casually told her he bought the house a month earlier.
In 1993 the Shipmans' great-granddaughter Barbara Andersen and her husband, Gary, bought the house from the family company named for Willie, WH Shipman Ltd. They spent 3 1/2 years renovating it as a bed and breakfast.
That was appropriate for a house that had extended hospitality to visitors such as writer Jack London, musician Helen Desha Beamer and Queen Liliuokalani, in the years after she was deposed.
In the private company of friends at the house, the queen used to light up a cigar after meals, Barbara Andersen said.
The "Big House," as the early Shipmans called it, stands at the lower end of Reed's Island, a landlocked area within walking distance of downtown Hilo but cut off by the deep gulches of the Wailuku River and the Waikapu Stream. In 1899, contractor J.R. "Jack" Wilson built a wooden bridge to the "island" and started work on the 9,000-square-foot house.
Its signature is the round turret that faces visitors coming up the driveway. From this tower, using a telescope, the family had a clear view of ships entering Hilo Bay. Upon moving to Hilo nearly a century later, computer hardware architect Gary Anderson used the tower as his office for a while, telecommuting to work in San Francisco.
Willie's office was at the back of the house for a time, on the second story above a water tank. To get to it, he would climb out his bedroom window and scamper across a catwalk, Barbara Andersen said.
Despite its grandeur, with much koa furniture, all of the materials used to build the house were "off the shelf," Andersen said.
Some of the materials were nevertheless unusual. For example, floor-to-head-size windows serve as doorways to the lanai. Designed to thwart taxes in jurisdictions where houses were taxed on the number of doors, the windows serve to this day as head-bangers for the unwary.
Builder Wilson included the latest conveniences as they were conceived at the time. The meant electric lighting but few electric sockets. With no radios, televisions or VCRs, there was little need for them.
Wilson built just one bathroom with full plumbing. When the Andersens bought the house, it came with a complete collection of chamber pots.
While renovating, the Andersens discovered the bathroom pipes had metal troughs under them, perhaps indicating the builders did not trust indoor plumbing to be leak-free.
The Andersens also discovered that under wallpaper, the walls consisted of inch-thick planks covered with stretched muslin. They left one section of wall uncovered to show the chalked notations of turn-of-the-century carpenters.
