From her second-floor home office on Tantalus, interior designer Ginger Lunt looks out her window and sees the southern slope of the rich, green Ko‘olau Mountain Range, which reaches all the way to downtown Honolulu and, beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.

Up here, Lunt can take in the light and a gentle breeze while sketching ideas, examining fabrics, drawing up plans for her next luxury residential project. She’s away from the bustle of city life, working amidst a peaceful sanctuary in one of O‘ahu’s least disturbed hideaways. The only sounds she hears might be gentle bird songs or a light afternoon rainfall.

The absence of any nearby neighbors allows for tranquility—or, if she’s in a different mood, the ability to crank her stereo up to 11. The roaring rhythms of Bob Marley, Fat Freddy’s Drop, Lord Huron. Either way, she’s in her zone.

“I have an emotional connection to this place,” Lunt says, reminiscing. “This is the house [where] I spent time in elementary and middle school; my sister and I would play with the three daughters of the family that lived here. This is where our families would have Christmas Eve dinners together every year.”

Lunt grew up on Tantalus. Her family lived just a few doors down, and they knew the grandparents who had built this two-story home back in the mid-1950s. “Cool [and] appealing ... literally bursting with lush tropical shrubbery,” read the real estate listing in the newspaper after the house was first constructed. (The asking price in 1956 was $65,000.) After a short time, the grandparents changed their minds and pulled the ad. They wanted to live in their new home instead.

Selling this 15,000-square-foot property would come later—much later, when Ginger Lunt purchased the home from the grandchildren in 2018. (“What was most important for everyone involved was the idea of preserving the architecture and design integrity of the house, no matter what,” she says.) At the time, Lunt had just launched her own design business, having previously spent nine years working for the award-winning luxury design firm Philpotts Interior.

“I interned at Philpotts before I left for college in San Diego. When I came back, I was lucky enough to work with them,” says Lunt, who was born and raised in Hawai‘i. “My mom was a photographer and my dad was a realtor and musician, who was always inspiring me with homes he was selling. I became interested in design early on.”

While working at Philpotts, with much of her time spent on the Big Island, Lunt developed a passion for luxury residential design. So when the opportunity to purchase the Tantalus home she loved as a child presented itself, Lunt went for it. But moving in wasn’t going to be as easy as she initially thought. There was a large amount of deferred maintenance on the property, an issue compounded by the weather.

“The climate and environment up here are really beautiful, but it’s hard on houses,” Lunt allows. “Over the years, this house hadn’t experienced many updates. Which was great because it means that this historic property had been relatively untouched. But humidity traps moisture, rain beats up surfaces; there were now a lot of structural issues that needed to be addressed.”

Lunt had to restore the house from the ground up. Literally. Two tall cylindrical metal poles held up the property and a (cantilevered) corner of the house had begun to sag. To remedy this, three additional poles were fabricated and installed as means of support. The upstairs balcony railings, undone long ago by rainfall and wrapping vines, had to be rebuilt entirely. Downstairs, solid wood paneling was incorporated into the ceiling to act as shear support for the building to stay level, while every inch of the koa wood flooring was refinished. At one point, the first floor was nearly completely exposed to the outside because all the doors and windows—which took up two sides of the house—had to be temporarily removed.

“Most of these sliding glass features weren’t able to move. So almost everything had to be taken down, sanded, repaired,” says Lunt.

The home’s advanced age created additional challenges. Specific fixtures, like antique hinges and certain metal pins, were often produced by companies that had stopped offering replacement parts years ago—if the companies themselves weren’t out of business completely. New elements, like a tall kitchen island that emerged after the previously enclosed kitchen was opened up, required custom furniture.

“Evan Boyle, of Burl & Barrel in Kailua, made me a couple of great walnut bar stools because the counter was higher than a typical bar height so nothing ready-made was available.”

In a perfect world, Lunt says, she’d have gotten everything custom-built, from furniture to fixtures. But, for now, she having those key elements made-to-measure whenever possible, then piecing together the rest. The additions are pieces she’s collected over the years, that she loves now and will cherish for decades to come. For Lunt, that speaks to the entire mission: “Holding onto what matters, for as long as I can.”