Roland Terry

Every other name in this wing worked with a chisel, a brush or a catalogue. Roland Terry worked with a drawing board. He is not a tiki figure and never claimed to be — the University of Washington, which holds some thirteen thousand of his drawings, calls him “one of the most important figures in Northwest Modernist architecture”, and the buildings he is remembered for are Canlis above Lake Union, the downtown Nordstrom flagship, Sun Mountain Lodge in the Methow Valley, and a long line of houses set into the woods and the water. He reaches this chart on the strength of a single line in a finding aid: on May 1, 1958, his firm dated a set of drawings for the Kalua Room at Seattle’s Hotel Windsor.

That one line reframes a room. The Kalua opened in December 1953 and ran until about 1969, so what its regulars remembered — the waterfalls and matting, the monkeys behind plate glass, the small screened dining nooks — they remembered from the years after Terry’s drawings, not before them. How much he changed is not yet knowable. The finding aid gives a title and a date and nothing else; the drawings themselves sit under access restrictions at the University of Washington, viewable only by advance request; and no period notice of a Kalua remodel has surfaced in any open archive. From the outside of a card catalogue, a gut rebuild and a set of minor alterations look exactly alike.

The route by which a Northwest modernist came to draw a Polynesian room runs through Honolulu, and it runs the opposite way from the one you would expect. In 1949 Terry’s first firm, Tucker, Shields & Terry, worked with Wimberly & Cook of Honolulu to build the Canlis Charcoal Broiler in Seattle: Peter Canlis had already opened a restaurant on Waikiki, and he brought his island architects north with him. Terry kept the client and kept the direction of travel. Terry & Moore drew a Canlis renovation in 1958, and by the 1960s and 70s Terry was working in Honolulu himself — the interior of the Kahala Hilton in 1963, the interior of the Halekulani in 1980. Whose name belongs on the later Canlis rooms is contested between the two firms’ archives, and this entry claims only the Seattle one. But the tropics were plainly not a costume he put on for a single job in 1958.

The nearer explanation is duller and probably truer: Terry was a restaurant architect, and in mid-century Seattle that meant working for Walter Clark, who ran some fifty-three restaurants across the Northwest in fifty-five years and hired Terry & Moore again and again. Among the Clark rooms in Terry’s drawing list is one more of interest here — the Islander in Tacoma, a tropical supper room in the Perkins Building that advertised dancing and dining in a tropical atmosphere, which Clark bought in 1957 and Terry & Moore remodelled between March and August of 1959. Terry never built a tiki bar. He drew good rooms for people who happened to want palms in them, and the difference is worth keeping straight: beneath the thatch and the lauhala of at least one Northwest tiki temple there is a modernist’s plan, drawn by a man who would be made a Fellow of the AIA for something else entirely.