An Audience with Peter Calthorpe.

For Peter Calthorpe, beauty is the beginning of something deeper.

When he arrived at Kohala to begin work on Nānā Kai, he didn’t come with a design already in mind. Peter came to listen.

He walked the land first, the globally renowned architect, urban designer and urban planner, who is credited with being a pioneer of the New Urbanism movement. Calthorpe heard what it wanted to be. The wind, the slope, the light, the silence—all of music and mathematics told him what’s needed.

This sensitivity to place has guided Calthorpe’s work from small infill and mixed-use neighbourhoods to new towns, city-wide plans and regional frameworks. At Nānā Kai, it’s created a landscape unlike any other: one that is native and restorative, wild and peaceful. Every element is carefully chosen not only to look beautiful, but to feel meaningful.

And you do. You feel it in the hush beneath the monkeypod trees, in the dappling of light through the rainbow shower, in the fragrant breath of native plantings that speak of the place—not the palette. There are lava walls, koa wood fences and barefoot paths that guide without intrusion. There are trails that wind through shaded groves and open to vistas of sea and sky, anchoring you to the scale and stillness of the island itself.

In a place so ecologically and spiritually rich, Calthorpe’s design philosophy had to be one of restraint. He chose a plant palette of mostly native and canoe species, restoring what once was and helping regenerate the delicate ecology of Kohala. He worked closely with cultural consultants to understand not just what to plant, but why—grounding the landscape in meaning, not trend.

The result is a community that doesn’t feel like it was built, but like it’s always been. A place where shade trees create comfort. Where open stretches of land allow for movement, meditation and memory. And where people slow down, instinctively, because the land asks them to.

Peter Calthorpe has brought the same intuitive approach that has defined his 35-year career—the same determination that has guided his writings and led him to become one of the founders and the first board president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as a winner of the Urban Land Institute’s prestigious J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. An approach characterized by the understanding that landscapes foster connection to the earth, to each other, and to the self.

At Nānā Kai, Calthorpe’s work draws the love for the land with a free hand and an artist’s eye. You see it in every tree, stone and stretch of trail. And in every tree, stone and trail, you feel it: reciprocated.