Most of the coverage of this project is about permits, timelines, and financing. Those are fair things to write about. They are also not what most people are curious about when they think of Coco Palms.
Here is what the restored property is actually planned to be.
The brand
Coco Palms will reopen as Coco Palms, A Kimpton Resort. Kimpton is part of IHG Hotels & Resorts, and this will be the first Kimpton in Hawaiʻi and the brand’s west coast resort flagship in the Americas. Highgate will operate the property. Reef Capital Partners remains the owner.
Kimpton has run boutique hotels since 1981 and tends toward properties with a specific character rather than a repeatable template. That was a large part of why the brand fit here. A site like this one does not survive being flattened into a standard.
The rooms
350 accommodations across three low-rise hotel buildings and a set of cottages.
That number is deliberate. The property had more than 400 rooms before Hurricane Iniki. The restored resort has fewer, in lower buildings, which affects everything downstream from traffic to the way the site reads from the highway.
The grounds
The 15-acre coconut grove is the center of the property, as it has been since the 1950s.
The grove is the reason for the name. It was planted roughly 130 years ago as part of a copra venture that failed, declined to around 75 surviving trees by the 1950s, and was nursed back by the hotel and its proprietor Grace Guslander. Guests will have access to it for everything from quiet mornings to movie nights to wedding ceremonies.
The historic lagoon remains a defining feature of the site.
Food, drink, and amenities
Three outdoor swimming pools and an onsite spa. A rooftop bar, a pool bar, and a restored shoreline restaurant.
Kimpton’s standard guest programs will run here as they do at the brand’s other properties, including morning coffee and tea service, an evening social hour, in-room yoga mats, and pet-friendly rooms.
The evening torch-lighting ceremony, one of the traditions most associated with the original hotel, returns.
The cultural center
This is the part of the plan that matters most and gets covered least.
The property will include a cultural center and museum dedicated to Kauaʻi, hosting exhibits, lectures, and activities. It is intended for residents as much as for guests, and its subject is the history of the place it sits on, including the pre-contact history of Wailua.
Wailua was a seat of aliʻi. The area holds heiau, a royal birthing site, fishponds, and burial grounds, and a density of moʻolelo found in few other places in the islands. That history predates the hotel by centuries and is not incidental to it.
The restoration is guided by a cultural advisory committee of Kauaʻi kūpuna, and the principles that committee gathered from Native Hawaiian community members, Wailua residents, and the wider Kauaʻi community shape how this work proceeds.
Where it sits
Coco Palms is in Wailua on the east side of Kauaʻi, on Kūhiō Highway across from Wailua Beach, about five miles from Līhuʻe Airport.
The Wailua River runs alongside the property and continues twenty miles inland past rainforest and waterfalls. Fern Grotto is reachable by boat. Beaches, hiking, and the rest of the east side are within a short drive.
When
The current target is 2028. Reservations are not open, and will be bookable through IHG when they are.