Claudia Huntington had been visiting Hawaii for more than 50 years when she finally decided to buy a house on the Big Island.
As a child, she’d traveled with her parents (her great-grandfather was the railroad baron Henry Huntington, who founded the Huntington Library and the city of Huntington Beach in Orange County, Calif.), but the family had always stayed in hotels.
One year, when she and her sister were already married with children, Huntington, by then an equity portfolio manager at Capital Group, decided to rent a house instead.
“That was transformational,” she says. “It was so much more fun—there’s something about getting up and making breakfast together, and sitting at a pool without a lot of people around. It becomes a family event.”
After that, Huntington figured “why not bite the bullet and build our dream house.”
With her husband Marshall Miller, Huntington bought a two-acre lot within the Mauna Kea Resort—a development founded by Laurance Rockefeller in the 1960s.
After two years of trying to choose an architect, she settled on Mark de Reus. “I basically flipped through Architectural Digests and ripped out pages, I think I went through 10 years’ worth of them,” Huntington says. In 2009, construction began on a five-bedroom, six-and-a-half-bath compound spread across nearly 6,700 interior square feet.
Once the house was completed in 2013, Huntington, who is based in San Antonio, Texas, began to visit the island for month-long stretches.
She worked from home but took ample time to enjoy island time. “It was perfect,” she says. “We’d go sailing and swimming, it was just as we dreamed it.”
But now, just seven years later, Huntington has put the house on the market, listing it for $22.9 million with Hawai’i Life realtors.