A Professor-Turned-Farmer’s Circular Hawaii Home Takes Full Advantage of Mesmerizing Views

Roughly 1,000 feet above sea level on the slopes of Mauna Loa, Captain Cook (population 4,000) is a world away from the manicured lawns and putting greens of the sprawling resorts elsewhere on Hawaii’s Big Island. The center of the Kona coffee industry, the area is verdant and a little wild, with small farms that dot the landscape and banana plants as tall as two-story buildings. 

Mitchell Lee Marks bought six acres of agricultural land here in the 1990s. Two decades later, when he was on the verge of retiring from his career as a professor at San Francisco State University, he decided to build a house on the property and begin life as a farmer. For help, he turned to Craig Steely, a Hawaii- and San Francisco–based architect whose climatically attuned work he had seen and admired.

Steely remembers seeing the land for the first time and bushwhacking through thick, overgrown underbrush to determine where the new house should go. "The site was filled with cat’s claw and guinea grass and feral mango trees," Steely recalls. "You couldn’t see anything. The cat’s claw was six feet tall." With some clearing, however, the architect knew that the upper portion of the site, which sits 300 feet above a road, would provide a panoramic view of Kealakekua Bay and the Kona coastline. "When you look at it now, it’s like, how could you not build it here?" he says.