HOME TOUR: A Hideaway in Hawai‘i.

To get to Ren MacDonald-Balasia’s family home, you need to know how Hawai‘i works—to know that the roads will zigzag sharply across the mountains, for example, or that you’ll ultimately only get to where you’re going by following your intuition, rather than looking at Google Maps. Even when you’re outside the house, it’s still not clear that this sloping lot in O‘ahu’s lush Mānoa Valley, a 15-minute drive from central Honolulu, is the right place. A cement staircase inlaid with small stones curves through eucalyptus and ironwood trees that hide the house from view; it’s only as you climb that the house reveals itself, modest and minimalist, the exterior wood painted a brown that emulates the color of the island’s dark earth. 

MacDonald-Balasia grew up in the house and lived there until she was eight. Now 36, the celebrated artist behind floral design studio Renko splits her time between Los Angeles and Hawai‘i, where she always stays with her grandmother, Tomi Kaizawa Knaefler, who has lived in the house for 65 years. Kaizawa Knaefler remembers first happening upon the lot with her then-husband, “whoever he was.” (“She’s had three husbands,” MacDonald-Balasia explains, “and a lot of boyfriends.”) The couple had made a wrong turn, and when they saw the wooded site on the then-sparsely populated street, Kaizawa Knaefler knew that it was “exactly what I wanted.”