Hale Nukumoi by Walker Warner Architects & builder, R.S. Weir General Contracting. Photo: Matthew Millman
I had the pleasure to speak with one of Vladimir Ossipoff’s builders, Randy Weir, founder of R.S. Weir General Contracting in Kauai. Randy has worked in the industry for over 40 years with world renowned architects such as Olson Kundig, Marmol Radziner and Walker Warner Architects just to name a few. In our conversation, he has some great Ossipoff stories as well as insights into building in the complex environment of the islands.
Chelsea Anderson
How was it to work with Vladimir Ossipoff?
Randy Weir
We did three projects for him, two of them were residential projects and the other for the National Tropical Botanical Garden. That was a lot of fun, he’s just a really nice guy, extremely talented. I watched him on one of the residential projects to sit down with the drawings and in a matter of about two hours was able to pick out all the various colors. Some of them I thought were a little crazy, but he had this habit of saying, just wait till its done.
Like I said, he was a very nice guy, but he was also very strict. He wouldn’t tolerate any cowboys. Working with him was a good experience for us, and we came away being very good friends.
CA
Did he have problems with other contractors that wouldn’t directly follow his drawings?
RW
For instance, on the one residential unit we were building, the owner and his wife were from Michigan, and he hired the pool contractor on his own. It was outside of our contract, and it was with a really good pool contractor, and he was well known. But I remember walking down there and the pool contractor had come in and put some concrete pavers down, artificial rocks, and artificial lava rock with skins and all that kind of stuff. I remember walking down there with Ossipoff and he kind of looks around and he goes, who did this? I said, well, that was the pool contractor hired by the client. He looks at it and goes, I never saw a shop drawing for the way out of any of these stepping stones and all this around the pool. I said, I’m sorry I don’t know anything about that. He goes, Well, I like to do my erasing and changing with just a regular eraser, if the contractor likes to do it with a jackhammer that’s his business. Sure enough, they were there jackhammering and rearranging some of these things. I’m going to say this was about 1984 – 85, somewhere around there.
“Well, I like to do my erasing and changing with just a regular eraser, if the contractor likes to do it with a jackhammer that’s his business.”
-Vladimir Ossipoff
Our company has been around since 1976. I graduated from Arizona State with a degree in construction project management and a business degree undergraduate degree from the University of Hawaii and a Masters in Economics University of Hawaii, then I came back to Kauai in 1971. I worked during my college years at the University of Hawaii, I was a project manager for Standard Oil Company. When I moved over here [Kauai], I went to work for another contractor from 1972 – 76. In 1976 started our business and have been fortunate enough to have some really nice work over the years.
Walker Warner [Architects] is a really excellent firm and we have done about three or four projects for them. The last couple of years I got to know Greg quite well. The family actually lived on Kauai for quite a number of years. His dad was a doctor for the plantation here and my family was in the sugar plantation business and about 10 or 15 years ago we bailed out of that.
CA
Can you tell me more about growing up in Hawaii?
RW
Yeah, I was born and raised, my family has actually been here since 1863. They came from New Zealand, settled here. We still have the ranch. We used to have a sugar plantation on the west side. But as I said, this year we had just bailed out as it was just becoming uneconomical. So now we’re just into ranching and leasing lands.
CA
Having seen a lot in the building industry over the years, what some of the biggest changes you’ve seen from when you started until today?
RW
Most of it is in the quality of designs that are now more common. There’s a lot of really good architects that are doing projects here. The islands have become really popular. Virtually all of the work we do here are for people that are not from the island. A lot of a lot of CEOs and best of, that sort of thing. The houses have gotten bigger and nicer.
Aside from that, some of the codes have changed for hurricanes. But mostly it’s mostly design, because when we started in 1976, there were common tract house projects we would get or garage additions. Right around 1980, 82, 83, we started seeing more of the higher-end projects coming along. Of course, recently there has been a lot more. We have projects going on with Walker Warner, Olson Kundig and we’ve also just completed another one with Marmol Radziner out of Los Angeles. So, lots of opportunity.
CA
How was it building the house on Poipu Beach for Walker Warner Architects, Hale Nukumoi?
RW
Yeah, that was a fun one, we were building the first house and then the owners bought the property next door, the second house, and there was another house on that, that was demolished, all that sort of drove some changes. The first beach house they wanted the connection between the two to make it a bit more user-friendly. We really liked the cast-in-place concrete walls, the color was really nice, it was a custom mix of coral. Its ground coral as the aggregates and white sand. They actually were batched right in the truck off site and then trucked down.
We really liked the cast-in-place concrete walls…it was a custom mix of coral…ground coral as the aggregates and white sand… batched right in the truck off site and then trucked down.
Hale Nukumoi by Walker Warner Architects Builder, R.S. Weir General Contracting. Photo: Matthew Millman
CA
How has material sourcing changed over the years on the islands?
RW
There still are lumber companies that are on the island, but we find that the quality of the material from suppliers in Seattle is superior. We have one company in Seattle that procures everything for us in containers and ships it over on flat racks depending on the material. I have a specific source that I’ve been working with for over 25 years. Really great service. We find that by the time the material gets here, it’s actually less expensive than if we were to buy locally. Every so often we’ll get estimates from local lumber companies and we find that they haven’t been competing very well.
So, we bring everything in, and there are a lot of really nice exotic woods that we use. We use a lot of Vertical Grain Douglas Fir, Western Cedar Clear, Sapele, IPE and all this stuff. We just find it’s far easier to get good material from the West Coast doing source specific.
CA
You definitely have to make sure that you aren’t short on your estimate.
RW
If its just common framing lumber, and we run short of something, or we might find some of it unusable we’ll get it from the local lumber yard. But for the nice stuff, no. Our estimates are highly detailed, there are about seven to eight hundred line items. We account for everything, there’s no guesswork involved. Part of doing business here is that we have to be very careful in making sure that we stage our shipments of various material carefully. It requires a bit more forethought, rather than just running down to the lumber company.
CA
Is that because you don’t have the room on site or is it because you don’t want your materials out in the elements?
RW
Yes, I don’t want finish materials sitting on the site [in the elements] as much as possible. We do have warehouse space and we’re able to keep some of it there as well as store all of the pre-ordered appliances, light fixtures, and other typical long-need items and are at our warehouse ready to go.
CA
One of the reasons that drew me to study Vladimir Ossipoff, is the context of Hawaii and how it could relate to my work here in Charleston. Climatic concerns, like humidity, salt in the air, heavy rainfall, harsh sun, and hurricanes. Questions that I ask are, how do buildings respond to such harsh conditions and how are we approaching these climatic conditions as architects and builders? What materials are we using? So, I think there’s just a lot that can be learned and applied here in South Carolina.
Are you seeing more and more requests for woods that are tough against rot like Kebony?
RW
Yes, absolutely and we always discourage any use of particle board, MDF or any of that stuff. There’s a couple of new ones, I’ve tried Accoya for example, and they’re waterproof. I’ve actually had a sample soak in water for 48 hours and the dimensions changed by maybe a thousandth of an inch or something. So pretty good stuff.
CA
Are you starting to see a move toward more prefabrication and things like that with labor concerns and keeping up with the level of quality that architects are starting to expect?
RW
For us as an individual company we’re always on the lookout for talented people and there’s not a whole lot available that are not hired. But on this island, you’d be surprised how many really good craftsmen there are. We have 45 people in our company and of those I’d say 30 of them are we would call first-class, high-end craftsmen and the others are possibly younger guys in the process of learning that will be at that category before too long. We will often make work for that guy here if somebody is dissatisfied with another contractor or somebody new comes on the island. We check into them carefully, and if they’re good people we’re going to make a job for them because they’ll get grabbed up. There is definitely a shortage of really high-quality guys on the island.
There is one company that’s headquartered in Colorado that has been hiring people [for the short-term] and paying way above market rates and it is putting the squeeze on us because most of our people have been working for us for at least twenty years, some of them closer to thirty years and during those periods there may be a couple of slow months or layoffs. Not because we don’t have the work, but because the County is really slow at processing permits. Then again, in 2008, the market dived for a while, and then it picked up again.
We always try to explain to people, look, we’re not going to pay as much as some other company is going to pay because when they’re done [with a project], they’re just going to drop you. Consider that if you’re laid off for four months out of the year, it doesn’t matter what you’re paid the other eight months. That’s a battle with the other builders. There are about two to three other builders that I consider to be in the same market as we are and they are faced with the same issues.
CA
Do you see a shortage of young people entering the trades?
RW
I do see that, and that’s why when I see a young guy interested I make sure to get them work.
Hale Nukumoi by Walker Warner Architects Builder, R.S. Weir General Contracting. Photo: Chelsea Anderson
CA
How often are your Architects coming out to the islands to visit their jobsites typically?
RW
Generally, at least once a month, sometimes more frequently, if they’re here for another project, they’ll come by. In general, we encourage architects to come by and the owners, actually we like to have owners directly involved, to come by at least once a month, at the very least. Sometimes the owners are living on the island, they have other homes here and that’s really nice because we can get them on site to ask questions and route it through.
We work with the architects, following the protocol, but it’s always nice to have the owners there because they show up on the job, and they didn’t realize this, that or the other thing, and we get the architects involved in these issues and get them resolved long before it becomes a problem.
CA
Earlier in our conversation you mentioned how you don’t use any particle board, MDF, OSB or any products like that because of how it reacts to the moisture in the air. Does the building code have this as a requirement, or is that a personal choice?
RW
The building code doesn’t speak much about what kind of materials to use. There’s a lot of middle and lower income housing out here and they started insisting that everything was all plywood boxes for cabinets, this, that and the other thing, and that started to drive the cost up even more by some of their mandates. What’s [also] happened here is that the solar lobby has gotten a hold of the legislature. They realize that the writing was on the wall because in 2019 a lot of the federal subsidies for the state, subsidies for utilizing solar water heating, were going away. Up until about a year ago, we were able to get a waiver and use an on-demand gas water heater instead of the solar. I personally would not like to see big solar panels on my roof, I think it takes away from the look of the house and I think that the on-demand gas water heaters are just as efficient. The solar lobby got a hold legislature and they wrote a law that said that it was fine if you wanted to get a waiver and use on-demand gas heater, but that entire heater unit needed to be UL certified or assisted. Although you cannot find an on-demand water heater that is UL listed. I called UL to confirm this, and they said they will list the electronic parts, but they do not list anything to do with propane or natural gas. [The legislators] wrote the law as such so that you couldn’t get a waiver and you were forced to go solar. They will although allow a heat pump with electric water heater, because it is UL listed.
That’s part of the issue that falls on affordable housing here, aside from all the land use laws and regulations that make it really difficult. A simple and non-controversial, non-beachfront lot would take you six months to get permits.
CA
How long does it typically take to process a permit for beachfront property?
RW
As a matter of fact, a project they are working right now has been going on about 14 months. As soon as you have any substantial amount of grading, and this one does have a lot of it, then the engineering division is one of the worst ones to deal with at the county level. It just takes forever, which can be frustrating.
Poipu Beach, Kauai, HI (Site of Hale Nukumoi by Walker Warner Architects). Photo: Chelsea Anderson
CA
Back on the topic of OSB, there has been growing popularity in the use of products like the zip panel system, and moving towards tighter construction. How do you feel about products like these and what is your approach to the envelope when working with architects that may not be familiar with working in the area? Do you typically seek a tight house or one that can breathe?
RW
The typical house used to be totally vented all the way up in the attic and crawl spaces and all that. Now more and more, we’re not doing any vented attics or roofs, and they’re all sealed off with various sealants and lots of insulation.
Now, if it’s a post and pier house, the crawl space is nicely vented all by itself. In a stem wall system you want to make sure there’s lots of ventilation there. They will use what we can a rat slab to seal off any moisture coming up from the earth or put on a product like Stego Crawl or something like that, that covers the soil and is cut around any spots where there is and taped seams, then moves up the CMU walls or cast-in-place concrete walls to about three inches from the top. It’s fully isolating the floor system before framing from any substantial moisture. Then when you combine that with venting the space to keep it nice and dry, but that [moisture] can be a real issue.
One of the architects we’re talking with right now had a house built and they had a stem wall and they did not put anything covering the ground and all of their pocket [door] openings or recesses they had for the sliding doors were not properly waterproofed. So, they ended up getting a ton of water into the crawl space leaving it soaking wet. We had a lot of rain last year, and it grew into black mold. They had to have that mediated. The owner was actually kind enough to pay the contractor to fix it, but they just walked out and they didn’t finish it so now they’re in court. That is the dumbest thing that guy ever did because there is going to be no mercy on him. Contractors are assumed to know more so they should be protecting their clients. There’s a lot of flakes on the island that just don’t consider some of the finer aspects of moisture and rot all that.
Walker Warner Architects use a company [envelope consultants], and those guys really know their business, we enjoy working with them. Despite all my experience here on the island for the last 40 years, I’ve learned a lot from this guy. They’ve helped to improve our waterproofing, and moisture proofing in buildings. They specialize in building envelopes and all of that sort of thing, they’re really good guys to work with.
CA
Thank you so much for your time today Randy, it was a great conversation.
