ESSENTIALS
Firm Name: Craig Steely Architecture
Principal: Craig Steely
Headquarters: 8 Beaver St., San Francisco, CA
Accolades: Forbes Architecture’s “America’s Top 200 Residential Architects,” 2025; Forbes Architecture’s “America’s Best-in-State Residential Architects,” 2025.
House Name: Musubi House
Location: Paauilo, Hawai‘i
Site Specifics: On the Big Island’s northeast slope of Mauna Kea, 4 miles upcountry, 100 acres of seasonal creeks, grassland and Ohi‘a forest overlooking the Pacific Ocean
Area & Layout: 2,200 square feet, 2BR, 2BA
“I’m not looking for a following. I’m looking for an interchange of ideas with people who are also speculating, trying things, and are curious.”
—Frank O. Gehry (1929–2025), Architect
Amid the media saturation of an ever-growing roster of Big Tech-titan land acquisitions and architectural exploits in the Hawaiian Islands (read: Dell, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Benioff and Intel’s Gordon Moore), the dominant image of the Hawaiian house of today suggests a subtropical version of Gilded Age Newport. Construction costs of some of these notably part-time residences land near $100 million. On sites so vast there could be no possibility of neighboring locals (most of whom choose to live in modest but charming corrugated-metal-roof huts) peering over one’s fence, the assertion implied by them is that bigger, to the tune of 10,000 square feet or more, is simply better. Sustainability be damned.
An aerial perspective of the 100-acre property captures both the architecture’s environmentally respectful horizontality and, in the distance, its proximity to the dormant volcano Mauna Kea, elevation 13,803 feet.
Darren Bradley
On the Big Island, where the 21st-century subtropical megacompound is also now very much a thing, Musubi House, by architect Craig Steely, demonstrates a wholly different approach.
The client came to Steely, an architect who works in both the Islands and California and has in the last ten years completed 10 houses in Hawaii, with three more currently in-progress, with a “simple” but not-so-simple directive: design a house that embraces the natural conditions of the site. For Steely, these 100 Hāmākua coast acres of windswept grasslands fronting the Pacific came with a self-imposed caveat. Only a result exhibiting social responsibility would be acceptable. The point of departure was clear.
Musubi House’s south-facing front, with the skyscape standing in for what might have been a wall in another architect’s hands, reveals Steely’s emphasis on dematerialization in the design. Here, in relative isolation, there was the luxury of sacrificing privacy concerns to instead use the building as a lens to celebrate the natural features of the site.
Darren Bradley
In keeping with his overall body of work, Steely, a devoted surfer and thus someone who has spent significant time in the ocean observing the coastline (and how most buildings detract from it), proceeded to design a small house that, with its bohemian openness of plan, glass walls, central atrium and lanai, manages to feel large.
Built into the slope of its 100-acre lot, Musubi House encompasses a mere 2,200 square feet. Its architecture, distinguished by a seemingly floating quadrangle roof that recalls a Northrop B-2 jet (annual rainfall here averages 102 inches and winds often reach 70 mph), posits that this terrain and nature’s flows at this location—not any preexisting design vocabulary mired in nostalgia—should serve as the ultimate generative factor.
Indeed, the house persuasively makes the case that, in a setting as extraordinary as this, any attempt at basing the design on “blending in” could only ever fall short. It also suggests that exercising restraint, in terms of footprint, may be the ultimate show of appreciation and respect for a locality—land and sky, people and culture.
The multi-level living area, with its views toward the Pacific, is anchored by one of three curving concrete walls that, along with large expanses of glass, comprise the structure and support the “floating” roof. Flanking the concrete wall are jalousie windows for fine-tuning the house’s passive-cooling system.
Darren Bradley
Steely’s take on a Hawaiian eat-in kitchen, with the Islands’ essence of informality and outdoors connectedness turned up to 11.
Darren Bradley
Beyond the dining table is the skylit spiral-stair entrance to the subterranean lounge. Here, the spatial fluidity between “indoors” and “outdoors,” along with the low-maintenance building materials and simple coastal aesthetic, nails the very aim of subtropical living.
Darren Bradley
The way the architect sited the house, the doors of the atrium can remain open even in extreme weather. “I have been in the atrium when the wind is pounding the outside and rain is traveling horizontally above our heads as we remain dry,” says Steely. The atrium, which acts as a ventilator for the entire house (allowing it to function comfortably in the absence of a mechanical-cooling system), has flooring of cut Pahoehoe lava.
Darren Bradley
The “elemental” guest bath, another space designed to remind of the sky.
Darren Bradley
At the west-facing side of the house, sheltered from the direct effects of the prevailing northeast winds, deep overhangs help cool the all-essential Hawaiian-house outdoor room, the lanai.
Darren Bradley
An aerial view at sunrise captures the overall design prominence of the roof, a 3′-thick, insulated-and-vented assembly surfaced with a liquid-applied, sun-reflecting “cool roof” finish. The roof also serves to capture rainwater, for storage in cisterns and re-use. The footpath at lower left terminates at the hot tub.
Darren Bradley
ABOVE: The floor plan reveals the triangular ordering of space, all of it “open” and oriented around a central atrium. The top of the triangle is the living area and study; the bottom left the primary and guest bedrooms; and the bottom right the dining area, kitchen and pantry.
Craig Steely Architecture
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardolsen/2025/12/07/forbes-house-of-the-week-big-island-breakaway/
