Shangri La

Doris Duke's Islamic art estate on the Kahala coast, tour-only access

Shangri La is Doris Duke's extraordinary estate on the Kahala peninsula, a clifftop compound built in 1937 and filled over six decades with more than 4,500 objects of Islamic art — tiles, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, architectural elements, and paintings from Morocco to Iran to India. The setting alone is remarkable: a Moghul-inspired pleasure palace perched above the Pacific.

Access is by guided tour only, booked through the Honolulu Museum of Art, which administers the property. Tours run Tuesday through Saturday and transport departs from the museum. The tour lasts about two hours. Demand is high and tickets sell weeks in advance, especially in winter. Worth the planning — there is nothing else like it in Hawaii, or possibly anywhere in the United States.

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A story
Doris Duke, the tobacco heiress, built Shangri La in 1937 after a world tour that included five months in the Middle East. She met her husband on a surfing beach in Honolulu and decided to build her home there, designing it around the Islamic art she had been collecting since her travels. She acquired work continuously until her death in 1993, never intending the house to become a museum — it became one anyway, opened to the public in 2002 and described as one of the finest Islamic art collections in private hands.

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