Serving as the Ulana Sales Gallery main reception piece, the custom monkeypod desk is a functional and eye-catching piece that pays homage to the building’s midcentury architecture.
CLIENT: The Howard Hughes Corporation
LOCATION: Honolulu, HI
COMPLETED: 2021
This custom-designed desk was created for the Ulana Ward Village Sales Gallery. It was designed to be the sister piece to the building’s main reception desk and is the reception entry piece into the Sales Gallery. The client requested a desk that was unique to their project, which allowed us to create a one-of-a-kind piece that was not only functional and eye catching, but also paid homage to the IBM Building’s mid-century architecture, designed in 1962 by famed mid-century architect Vladimir Ossipoff.
There were two important requirements of the design:
- Storage component large enough to house marketing flyers that were given to prospective homebuyers.
- The desk should complement the main reception desk in either design style or material usage. The two woods used for the main reception desk were monkeypod and mango.
Mid-century references were incorporated through the design of the free-standing leg as well as the detailing of the drawer pulls. The original concept was to incorporate sections of the desk that would be fabricated from walnut wood, however, due to the skyrocketing prices and the scarcity of walnut, it became cost prohibitive.
The nods to Hawaiian woodworking are reflected in the use of monkeypod, a wood commonly used to make Hawaiian calabash bowls due to its attractive color variation and its resistance to decay and termites as well as the incorporation of a live sapwood edge along two surfaces of the desk. To add a more soulful and handcrafted look, the curved waterfall edge of the desk incorporated butterfly patches which are prevalent in many natural edge Hawaiian style slab tables for both structural as well as decorative purposes.
For the fabrication of the desk, we teamed up with a local millworker who also fabricated the main reception desk for the building. The biggest challenge was the sheer engineering involved to create the curved waterfall edge. This involved creating a heavy mitered piece at the center point of the desk for structural purposes and hand carving the rest of the curve with a power planer and a hand sander to get it truly even and straight. This gave the desk the illusion of lightness while also allowing it to be structural stable. The end result was that the entire curved edge piece of the apron was made out of a two-mitered piece of solid wood and had no seams.
Mid-century references were incorporated through the design of the free-standing leg as well as the detailing of the drawer pulls. The original concept was to incorporate sections of the desk that would be fabricated from walnut wood, however, due to the skyrocketing prices and the scarcity of walnut, it became cost prohibitive.
The nods to Hawaiian woodworking are reflected in the use of monkeypod, a wood commonly used to make Hawaiian calabash bowls due to its attractive color variation and its resistance to decay and termites as well as the incorporation of a live sapwood edge along two surfaces of the desk. To add a more soulful and handcrafted look, the curved waterfall edge of the desk incorporated butterfly patches which are prevalent in many natural edge Hawaiian style slab tables for both structural as well as decorative purposes.