Down for a few days

Aloha, Friends.

I have received word from several of you out there that there are actually readers who enjoy this small niche of tiki culture. Thanks for the kind words and comments.

This blog is supposed to be all about eye candy. That said, I have been pretty disappointed with the quality of the imgaes so far (e.g. the Tiki Room Penguin art looks terrible). I have been using blogger to host my images, but when they are posted they have significantly lost resoultion and look terrible. I also don't like the fact that you can't click an image to see the larger version. Over the next few days I'll be looking for a third party to host the images, repair the previously posted pics and then continue on with this oddball exploration of tiki architecture.

Mahalo!

Zulu

Bali Ha'i Restaurant - New Orleans, LA

The Bali Ha'i at the Beach was located on Lake Pontchatrain in New Orleans, Louisiana. This is a nice example of how the architects took a very simple single story restaurant, added some peaked A-frames onto the roof after the fact and created a great looking tiki restaurant. They spruced it up with some exterior landscape elements and transformed a very simple structure into this great tiki establishment.




The bamboo screens along the back of the A-frames are a nice touch. You can't tell from the angle of this picture, but I assume there are tikis inside of each of the A-frames. There are also two nice large entrance tikis in the middle of the building at the front





Inside of the restaurant they had a great mural painted along the back wall of the Hawaiian Islands. Note the large Ku tiki along the left wall.

Kona Gardens - Garden Grove, California

The Kona Gardens complex is VERY unique when it comes to tiki apartments. It is special because they actually maintin their free standing tikis. I mentioned a few days ago that it is very rare to still find free standing tikis, but here at Kona Gardens there are lots of them.

The complex directory and map encased in the glass box.

The guardian tikis surrounding the swimming pool. It's great that the tikis still stand to this day, but there is a tradeoff. To keep them from rotting away, they have fully painted them green.

In addition to the tikis, they do have some nice exotic architectural elements to the buildings.

Kona Kai Hotel - Dumas, Texas

Here is a fine example of just how popular the Polynesian Pop Culture was during the 50s and 60s. Proprietors were trying anything to cash in on the craze. For instance, the Kona Kai hotel in Dumas, Texas.






They put a polynesian name on the place and added some fantastic roadside signage......and done. Now we have a tiki hotel. No, not really. There is nothing exotic about this place. But they are fun to look at, a majority of these type of hotels had some great signage.

The Islander Apartments - Santa Ana, CA

The Islander apartment complex in Santa Ana, California is a typical SoCal tiki themed apartment complex.








It has all of the elements that make a great tiki complex.

1. Lots of lush landscaping around the pool and garden paths.





2. It has a central swimming pool. It is very common to see a large A-frame structure around the pool building.





3. This complex has a little history associated with it because it was where storied beachcomber, Mr. Eli Hedley, retired to.

4. When hunting down these complexes today, it is actually pretty rare to still find tikis unless they are an integral part of a struture and can't be removed. The remaining tikis here at the Islander fall into that category. The free standing tikis are long gone or rotted away.



This tiki is still here because he is holding up the roof.

Penguins in Tokyo?

Walt Disney Imagineering, the creative think tank that fuels the Walt Disney Company, has developed some of the most incredible and beloved theme park attractions in the world. They create a massive library of ideas for shows and attractions for their parks around the world. However, a majority of the ideas and concepts they come up with never see the light of day. As is the case with this WDI concept for an overlay for the Enchanted Tiki Room at Toyko Disneyland.




The Enchanted Tiki Room at Toyko Disneyland.


This proposed overlay had the Tiki Room being taken over by a bunch of musical penguins bound for the South Pole, but have since taken up residence in the Tiki Room due to their airplane crashing into the building. You can read a little more about it over at the Neverland Files.







Several items of note in the drawing.
The ‘Bird Mobile’ has been replaced with a damaged airplane engine, the plane was named ‘Carribe Queen’.

On top of the plane engine you can see several musical penguins playing trumpets and a steel drum.

The Enchanted Fountain has been replaced with more musical penguins. The leader is wearing an old aviators outfit.

A Pele tiki is sitting between the crates in the old fountain and is now playing the bongos.

Some new Flamingos have joined the party and are singing behind the old fountain.

Two additional penguins are up top, the lounging male and the singing Carmen Miranda inspired female.

Several elements of the original show remain, including:
Three of the host birds
The tiki drummers
The chanting tiki poles
The singing birds of paradise.




It does snow at Tokyo Disneyland, the penguins would be right at home.


However, this entire concept was tossed in favor for the Stich overlay that was installed back in 1999.

Backyard Polynesia - Part 2

Another fine example of a backyard poolside Shangri La.

Location: Orange County, California





This 'Aloha' sign looks like it came from Oceanic Arts over in Whittier, CA.





Anyone bring their swim trunks?