83 / 88
The entrance to the home of Adrian and
Lesley Olabuenaga looks like the gateway
to a fun house dreamed up by Dr. Seuss:
A ire-engine-red door gives way to a
canary-yellow entryway, and once inside
there’s a glass table held up by a sphere,
a square, and a triangle. One bathroom
is tiled in Pepto-Bismol pink.
F
or 21 years, the owners have kept
their Maui home exactly as it was imag-
ined by its architect, Ettore Sottsass.
The Italian designer was the driving
force behind the Memphis Group, a
loose coalition of artists who devel-
oped the zany patterns and bright col-
ors that deined the late 1980s and early
’90s. He built only seven houses during
his lifetime, and this one, completed in
1997, is arguably his most distinctive.
This month, the couple are putting
the house on the market. (It has multi-
ple levels, and the Olabuenagas are get-
ting older.) They’ve listed it with Becky
Hanna of Island Sotheby’s International
Realty for $9.8 million.
The Olabuenagas were already
admirers of the movement when they
commissioned Sottsass. They sold
accessories by Memphis designers
through their company, Acme Studios
Inc., and after Sottsass agreed to do the
home, they handed the reins to him
entirely. “We wanted it to be a com-
plete expression of what he had in his
brain,” Adrian says. “We didn’t want to
get in the way.”
After it was finished, the couple
filled the home with Memphis-style
furniture to complete the look. This
includes one of Sottsass’ trademark
yellow-and-brown desk chairs, which
sits in front of a typewriter he did for
Olivetti, and a black, green, and orange
floor lamp by the Memphis-aligned
architect Michele De Lucchi. Sottsass
designed a bookshelf to hold Adrian’s
collection of radios, and one of his viv-
idly phallic, pale-pink Shiva vases is on
display in the guest bathroom.
In the subsequent decades, the
owners’ only intervention was to put
a new coat of paint on the house’s
exterior. “We live and breathe Ettore
Sottsass,” Lesley says. “We eat with
his cutlery and china. We drink out of
his glasses.” The furniture, the couple
say, could be included in the sale of the
house for an extra fee.
Although the Memphis Group has
become a popular reference point
again, it’s still a polarizing strain of
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY TRADE WINDS PHOTOGRAPHY
An island home that also happens to be
a design paradise.
By James Tarmy
Memphis, Hawaii