Tucked into the mid-century concrete fabric of Waikiki's Lewers Street, a ten-storey slab that once housed a modest apartment hotel was reborn in 2016 as the Surfjack Hotel & Swim Club — a renovation that treated the original building's postwar bones not as a problem to conceal but as raw material to work with. The project, led by design agency Fogged In Foundry in collaboration with local firm AHL, drew on Hawaii's golden age of modernism: the angled colonnade columns visible at pool level, the perforated breeze-block screens, and the tongue-and-groove timber ceilings all carry a lineage traceable to the Case Study era filtered through Pacific sensibility. The 112 guest rooms layer teal-and-white tropical-print headboards against woven grasscloth wall panels, low-slung platform beds in warm-toned timber, and sliding barn-style doors fitted with frosted glass that reveal bathrooms tiled in graphic starburst cement patterns. Ceiling fans with swept mahogany-finish blades underscore the deliberately unhurried atmosphere. At pool level, the communal spaces mix Eames wire side chairs with chevron-upholstered lounge seating in aqua and yellow-framed occasional tables — a palette that lands somewhere between vintage Polynesia and 1960s Southern California surf culture. The pool itself, oval and emblazoned with a Wish You Were Here tile inscription, functions less as amenity than as graphic statement — the whole property's argument, made visible from above.

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