Ricardo Legorreta’s buildings were walls first, and windows second. In his writings and in the interviews he gave before his death in 2011, the renowned Mexican architect gave walls a long list of jobs: screens, gateways, backdrops, dividers.
“The most significant characteristic that identifies my work is the wall, which I use both as a building element and as a symbol,” Mr. Legorreta wrote in 1991 in Architectural Digest.
The idea of walling something off is not the most natural fit for a house perched on a cliff overlooking some of the most beautiful views on the Kohala Coast of Hawaii. But it was Mr. Legorreta whom the Silicon Valley financier Sandy Robertson chose to build his retreat there, which is now for sale for $43 million, listed by Nick Segal and Shaun Alan-Lee of Carolwood Estates. It’s one of four Legorreta houses currently or recently on the market.
Each property has been featured in design publications as examples of what Mr. Legorreta brought to the craft. At a time when modernism was trading the wall for glass, he traded it back.
Born in 1931 in Mexico City into a prominent banking family, Mr. Legorreta began visiting Mexico’s villages and ruins as a boy, studying buildings made without architects and drawing inspiration from colonial haciendas, from the dignity of churches and from the robustness of the zócalos and plazas. He came of age as Mexico — still shaping its identity in the aftermath of the 1910 revolution and the decade-long civil war it unleashed — was seeking a unified style. In the 1920s and 1930s, according to the design curator Ana Elena Mallet, the state had enlisted muralists to paint its shared history on public walls, and architects to give the country a modern face rooted in its past.
A disciple of the architect Luis Barragán — the Pritzker Prize winner who fused modernism with Mexican tradition — Mr. Legorreta took Barragán’s walls and saturated pinks and mauves from private houses to hotels, factories and museums, said Ms. Mallet, who teaches at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico.
In 1985, Mr. Legorreta beat out 18 architects in a competition to design the Children’s Discovery Museum in San Jose, Calif., whose lead donor was the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. The purple building he created, echoing the pyramids of pre-Hispanic Mexico, was one of his first international commissions, said Louise Noelle Gras, an architectural historian at the Institute of Aesthetic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
That Mr. Legorreta found some of his most devoted patrons in Silicon Valley is something of a paradox: He made his name hiding views behind thick walls, while his clients made their names in towers of glass and chrome. Even Mr. Robertson and his wife, Jeanne, at first wanted glass, said Victor Legorreta, Mr. Legorreta’s son, who spent over two decades apprenticing under his father and working alongside him before taking over his practice following his death.
Mr. Robertson, who had been in the Bay Area since 1965 and died in 2024, connected many of the dots in Mr. Legorreta’s Silicon Valley career.
He first crossed paths with the architect in the 1990s when Chiron, one of the biotech companies whose initial public offering he had guided, commissioned Mr. Legorreta to build its California campus, a structure in warm ocher and terra cotta that stood in contrast to the sterile designs of traditional laboratories.
It was the light that first drew Mr. Robertson to Mr. Legorreta’s style: “If you’ve ever been in one of his buildings, the way the light comes in, it kind of glows,” Mr. Robertson’s daughter Brett Robertson said of the architect’s work.
What followed were field trips to Mexico, where the Robertsons stayed in a Legorreta-designed hotel and visited the beach houses he had created on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, said the architect’s son. The house in Hawaii began as a sketch on a restaurant napkin, which the architect later turned into a bronze model of a ruin, the house imagined as it would look 3,000 years in the future. It was the first time Mr. Legorreta used the exercise, which he later applied to all his buildings, to distill a property down to its most defining elements, like the curved roof, which was shaped like a sail, the colonnade, the separate courtyards and the reflecting pool, an inverted pyramid of descending squares, said his son.
The Robertsons, both avid swimmers, wanted to be near a swimmable beach and bought an oceanfront parcel in 1999, one of only 11 plots on a stretch of road inside a gated resort that connects two of the island’s most pristine beaches, said the family’s agent, Harold X. Clarke of Private Listings, a Hawaii brokerage.
So began a six-year collaboration with Mr. Legorreta, which involved creating a series of walls that moved seamlessly between indoor and outdoor courtyards.
The property is walled off and unremarkable from the street. “If you look at the towns in Spain, the old towns, you only see a door,” said Ms. Gras. “You never see a window from the street.”
Inside, the home unfolds through a series of axes and corridors, rooms opening to other rooms, leading to an inverted pyramid made of black lava, which descends into a reflecting pool. “It’s an architecture that you discover little by little,” said Mr. Legorreta’s son, who helped design the house.
Color was also a focus for Mr. Legorreta — he often painted his walls in a vibrant hue that his son calls “Mexican pink.”
In Hawaii, Mr. Legorreta walked through the property at different times of day before deciding on the exact hues of blond and gold, as well as pink and violet. The color formulas were all mixed in Mexico, he told Architectural Digest in 2008, a few years after the house was completed. “I don’t select color, I feel it,” he said at the time.
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