Ask any architect about building a coastal home in Hawai‘i and you will learn to respect mother nature and the powerful forces of the ocean they same way they do. The reasons include protecting homeowners from Pacific storms, and protecting the natural environment from homeowners.

For more than 10 years, designer Roger Gagon has been planning a little blue heaven on the island of Moloka‘i. He began by buying a parcel on the island’s bucolic western end, where the prairie-like landscape meets the blustery spray of the Kaiwi Channel, which separates Moloka‘i from O‘ahu. Sparsely developed, the area doesn’t have a single traffic light, and the only trace of urban civilization is the faint glow of Honolulu on the horizon after sunset. "I became attracted to Moloka‘i for everything Hawaiian and pristine," says Gagon, founder of Island Design Center on Maui.

In the language of geology, a tuff cone is a wide, low-rimmed accumulation of debris around a volcanic vent. The debris, or tuff (from tofus, a Latin word meaning soft, light, porous rock), is igneous rock that forms wherever airborne volcanic pumice falls back to earth, piling up like a sooty snowdrift. The cliffs around Portlock, a residential community on the slope of Koko Head, the lodestone of O‘ahu’s craggy southeastern coast, are made of tuff from the same eruption that formed the crater now known as Hanauma Bay. In the pellucid waters of the bay, a protected marine life conservation area, moray eels slink around Pocillopora coral formations.