Lanai's Back on the Map

The pool at the Four seasons Resorts Lanai at Manele Bay.

PHOTO: Courtesy of The Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

Until a quarter century ago, Lanai was renowned for one thing: pineapples. As the source of 75 percent of the world's supply of the fruit, the 141-square-mile Hawaiian island was safeguarded from tourism by its majority landowner, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now called Dole). This was a fairly easy task. With nowhere luxurious to stay, Europe and Asia's wealthy would hop over from the Mauian whaling town of Lahaina, just nine miles across the Auau Channel, to hunt quail, mou?on sheep and axis deer (a gift from India to King Kamehameha in 1867), then sail back. The plantation workers, many of whose families had labored in the fields for three generations, kept the island's beauty to themselves while watching the rest of the state grow into a booming beach destination—luaus, leis and all.

A few pineapples can still be found on Hawaii's sixth-largest island, but today there are a couple of good reasons to sleep over: the two Four Seasons Resorts, Lanai. Dreamed up by Dole CEO David Murdock as a way to maintain a stream of revenue as pineapple farming gained strength in Asia and South America, the hotels (formerly the Lodge at Koele and Manele Bay Hotel) were built between 1991 and 1993 but have been slow to evolve into the kinds of retreats that could entice those deer hunters into spending the night.

Serving as a museum for Murdock's sizable Asian-art collection and an occasional venue for elaborate fêtes, notably Bill Gates's 1994 wedding, the resorts struggled to keep up adequate standards in recent years. It wasn't until 2005, when Murdock and his company Castle & Cooke invested $100 million and brought Four Seasons ashore to refurbish and manage the unmoored properties, that Lanai emerged on the radar of discerning travelers in search of an authentic Hawaiian experience.

Set in the interior highlands, the 102-room Four Seasons Resort Lanai, the Lodge at Koele (double rooms from $295, suites from $695; 800-819-5053; fourseasons.com/koele) is an ode to plantation life. A string of wicker armchairs and ottomans on the front porch offer guests a prime spot for sipping pineapple cider and choosing the day's adventure: they can be shuttled to the Lanai Pine sporting-clay range or can saddle up for horseback rides in the hills. There's always a game of croquet in session on the lawn; some players join after a day at Experience, the hotel's stunningly landscaped golf courses, known to humble the most competitive golfers.

As guests return from the orchid nursery, the Chinese pagoda or the tropical gardens that blanket the hillside behind the lodge, the scent of kiawe wood welcomes them back to their colonial-influenced bedrooms, painted canary yellow and with mahogany beds that have, fittingly, little pineapples carved into their posts. Room service—a dinner of macadamia-crusted Lanai venison loin, perhaps—on a private wooden porch or balcony completes the outback mood.

A twenty-minute shuttle ride away, on a paved road over twelve miles of undeveloped red clay hills, the Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay (double rooms from $395, suites from $900; 800-819-5053; fourseasons.com/manelebay) is a world apart and the ultimate complement to the refined rusticity of Koele. On a stretch of arid volcanic coastline behind the powder-sand beach of Hulopoe Bay, Manele Bay has 236 rooms ingeniously hidden amid landscaped gardens with four shimmering koi ponds and buzzing dragonflies. Hawaiian floral prints accent guests' quarters, which are as understated as they are sumptuous (note the expansive marble bathrooms and the private lanais with ocean vistas).

At the Kailani Terrace, an open-air lounge with a two-story fresco depicting Chinese emperors in regal poses, guests snack on mini tacos with sesame-glazed beef and mango-avocado relish while talking about their indulgent banana-coconut scrubs at the spa or their snorkeling trips to the offshore reef teeming with angelfish, uku and sea turtles. But the true conversation stopper is the coastline. Whether framed by a suite's sliding shutter doors or viewed from a bamboo daybed on a tiled balcony, the Paci?c and its constantly shifting palette remind even cynics of why development that takes decades is sometimes worth the wait.

Just beyond the bay and the pool, a rocky trail leads to a beach overlook from which you can see Puu Pehe, an eighty-foot boulder 150 feet offshore, and, often, a school of spinner dolphins at play in the distance. Legend has it that a Hawaiian warrior buried the body of his beautiful princess bride at the summit of Puu Pehe. Today the rock formation—known as Sweetheart Rock—attempts to shroud what is no longer the plantation workers' secret: a pristine island and a pair of perfectly harmonious Polynesian resorts.