Eclectic Honolulu Architects Use Newport as Mainland Springboard

The receptionist who answers the telephone at the company’s Newport Beach office is accustomed to jokes about the firm’s name being “a mouthful”: Wimberly, Whisenand, Allison, Tong & Goo.

But the tongue-twisting name hasn’t slowed down the architectural firm, a specialist in hotel design.

Just four years ago, WWAT&G;, as it is known for short, sent a contingent of top staff from its base in Honolulu to open a satellite office in Orange County--and now it is fashioning a string of posh resort hotels between Newport Beach and Laguna Niguel, an area predicted to become the “Riviera” of Southern California.

So far the company, with 40 years’ experience designing hotels in the South Pacific, has received contracts through its Newport Beach office to design up to $400 million worth of hotels, mostly on the mainland. Having attained a firm foothold in the the United States, it has plans to gradually expand its business throughout the Sunbelt.

Recruits First-Raters

Gearing up for growth, the company recently recruited some of the “cream of the crop” of beginning architects from other county architectural offices, according to an officer of the Orange County chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

WWAT&G;’s staff is characterized by a large number of foreign-born architects, who have the flags of their native lands hanging above their drafting boards. The company’s principals say that the multinational staff brings a lot of different perspectives to a project.

Although relatively new to Southern California, WWAT&G; long has been a strong force in hotel development in the Pacific Basin.

Since its two founders, Howard L. Cook and and George J. Wimberly, reconverted the Waikiki landmark Royal Hawaiian Hotel from military to civilian use in 1945, the firm has designed more than 100 hotels with a total of 13,000 rooms in such exotic spots as Tahiti, Samoa, Fiji, Malaysia and Singapore. The firm’s 12 principals log about a million air miles a year attending to its far-flung enterprises.

Over the years, WWAT&G; has earned an international reputation for designing hotels that harmonize with their natural and cultural environment.

The firm is so well-known for blending architecture with lush landscaping that a year and a half ago King Fahd of Saudi Arabia commissioned it to design an elaborate, 80-acre garden for his new palace in the capital city of Riyadh.

The company takes pride that in 1983 it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture--a prize distributed every three years by the leader of the Moslem faith for architectural designs that reflect the Moslem culture. The award was for a hotel and sea-life museum in West Malaysia that revived local craftsmanship and native architectural forms rich with religious symbolism.

WWAT&G;’s architects say that over the years sensitivity to foreign cultures has been essential to the company’s success.

Learning to Adapt

In much of Asia and the Pacific, they say, an architect will run into considerable trouble if he does not take time to learn unwritten folk traditions.

In Japan and the Philippines, for instance, it is important to know that the number “seven” is bad luck--so an architect should never put seven steps or seven rooms in a row.

And in Chinese ethnic areas, an architect must pay heed to a folk belief called Feng Shui, which is a theory for placing buildings in harmony with nature.

In any Chinese area, one never places a bed so someone’s feet point toward the window--a sign of death--while in the Philippines it is equally bad form to place a bed so the sleeper’s feet point toward the door, say WWAT&G; architects.

WWAT&G; architect principal Ron Holecek said the most difficult challenge of his career was designing a hotel in the North Borneo region of Malaysia. He said an expert in Feng Shui informed him that the hotel could not be built over a stream that flowed through the property because that would encourage money to flow out of the project.

A Different Outlook

And the client who was building the hotel insisted at first that it be constructed without windows for fear that hotel guests would have a view of a distant cemetery, which was very bad luck.

“They hired the fire brigade to come out with their ladder arm--now this is in the middle of the jungle--and we went up 80 feet in the air in this bucket to look out,” said Holecek. “I took pictures and said, ‘See, you can’t see the cemetery.’ ” Finally, he said, his client was convinced that the hotel could safely have windows.

In Hawaii, Holecek said, every building site is “blessed by more religions than anywhere else in the world” and must be blessed again if any accident occurs during the construction.

And in Tahiti it is forbidden for a building to be constructed higher than a coconut tree. “So you look for the biggest coconut tree you can find,” said WWAT&T; architect principal Gerald L. Allison.

WWAT&G; architects say, though, that from a certain perspective the quirks of designing a building offshore aren’t really much different from the kind of restrictions imposed on architects in the United States. “They are much more formalized about it here. They call it building codes and planning commissions,” one of the architects quipped.

Designed Ritz-Carlton

Wimberly, Whisenand, Allison, Tong & Goo first gained prominence in Southern California by designing the year-old Ritz-Carlton resort hotel in Laguna Niguel. That high-profile project, the firm’s first in Southern California, started the ball rolling.

Soon after WWAT&G; began work on the Ritz-Carlton, the Irvine Co. solicited its help in drawing plans for the swank Four Seasons Hotel under construction in Newport Center. Along the way, WWAT&G; was also recruited to work on site plans for up to four other resort hotels that the Irvine Co. intends to develop in the coastal hills south of Corona del Mar.

Yet another major developer on the south Orange County coast, the Stein-Brief Group, selected WWAT&G; to design a $115-million hotel that it is negotiating to be operated as a Hyatt Regency.

In addition to working on the proposed 550-room Hyatt hotel, which is to include a large health spa, WWAT&G; has been hired to design the remaining commercial aspects of Stein-Brief’s 550-acre Monarch Beach resort community project in Laguna Niguel. As part of that project, the firm is renovating a private beach club and designing a tennis club, a 16-acre marketplace, two low-rise office buildings and a 250-room lodge.

Hotels in Florida

In all, WWAT&G;’s Newport Beach office has undertaken projects including two other Ritz-Carltons--one in Marina del Rey and one in Naples, Fla., a hotel and conference center in La Jolla, a Benchmark hotel in Vero Beach, Fla., and a 910-room Victorian-style hotel, to be called “The Grand Floridian,” at Disney World in Orlando.

Besides these projects--which have a total value of more than $400 million--the Newport Beach architects say they have embarked on design proposals for a number of projects, worth at least an additional $400 million, which have a 50-50 chance of coming to fruition.

Raymond Watson, a director and past chairman of Walt Disney Productions and a director and past president of the Irvine Co., said he first became acquainted with WWAT&G; while observing the firm’s work on an addition to the Mauna Kea hotel on the island of Hawaii.

“They can capture a theme to fit a marketing idea or a region you are trying to imitate,” said Watson, who recommended WWAT&G; for the Disney World and Irvine Co. coastal projects. “A lot of other architects are not willing to do that” because they insist on pro-jecting a certain signature style in their designs, Watson said.

WWAT&G; architects say that rather than repeat a distinctive style, they take pride in making each building blend into its environment. “We try to do a hotel reflective of the area and culture and clientele that will be using it,” said WWAT&G; principal Gerald L. Allison. “We don’t have a cookie-cutter response.”

Designs for Environments

“It’s not just a building that we do. It’s an environment and that’s what hotels are really all about,” said Don Fairweather, managing principal of WWAT&G;’s Newport Beach operation. “We love landscape architects,” he added.

Edward Hope, president of the Stein Brief Commercial Development Group, said the hotel that WWAT&G; has designed for Laguna Niguel will feature interior waterscapes that flow from fountains through dining and patio areas into reflecting pools and waterways outside the building. This intertwining of architecture and water, he said, is similar to the theme of the lushly landscaped, 830-room Hyatt Regency in Maui, which WWAT&G; also designed.

Wimberly Whisenand Allison Tong & Goo has split its architectural resources between its home office in Honolulu and the Newport Beach office, with four of the company’s eight architect principals in each office. Four other principals are in the corporation’s land planning division in Honolulu.

Fairweather said that WWAT&G; architects at first commuted from Honolulu to work on the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel. But he said it quickly became apparent to him that the mainland, and especially Southern California, held great potential for the company. So, in 1981, he opened the company’s first permanent satellite office in Newport Beach.

Access to Broad Market

Just as WWAT&G; takes on architectural jobs in the Pacific anywhere within 4,000 miles of its Honolulu home base, Fairweather said, the firm’s Newport Beach satellite is intended to give it access to a broad new market reaching eastward across the United States and into Western Europe.

In the last few years, Fairweather said, the business generated in Newport Beach has helped WWAT&G; ride out the recession, which hit harder and later in Honolulu than on the mainland.

The Newport Beach office contributed 60% of WWAT&G;’s total revenues in fiscal 1984, according to the firm’s officers, who declined to release total corporate revenue or earnings figures. This year, with business picking up in the Pacific, the revenue share for the mainland office is expected to drop to about 50%.

The rapid growth of WWAT&G;’s mainland business has caused it to greatly expand its Newport Beach staff, which since January has nearly doubled from 25 to 45 architects--compared to 35 architects and nine planners employed in Honolulu.