CB Grey x Mauna Kea

Mauna Kea invited me to Hawaii with a sentence that sounded like marketing: "To truly understand Mauna Kea, you have to experience it first-hand." I'd traveled a lot in my life. I assumed this would be another beautiful resort.

I was wrong within a day.

Mauna Kea is one of Hawaii's most iconic properties — built by Laurance S. Rockefeller in the 1960s, when its art collection and its obsessive attention to detail set the standard for what luxury even meant. But the history isn't what got me.

The guests got me. They were everywhere in head-to-toe bright orange Mauna Kea gear, worn like a family crest. Many had been coming for decades — people who arrived as children now watching their own children run the same stretch of beach. Nobody moved through the property like a tourist. Everyone moved through it like they were home.

So for five days, I did what I do. I studied. I wandered the property learning its history and its low-key-luxe "Old Hawaii" magic. And I interviewed guests everywhere I went, asking every one of them the same question: "What comes to mind when you think of Mauna Kea?" Almost every answer named the same beloved icons — the parrots, the Buddha, the manta rays, the surfboards, the koi, the architecture. Generations apart, total strangers, all speaking the same private language.

Then I sat on the beach and sketched — Fredrico in hand, Mauna Kea's signature cocktail, held strictly for inspiration — and the design began to pour out of me.

Except partway through, I realized the assignment was wrong. They'd asked for one design. But this place had two kinds of loyalists: the storytellers, who deserved a design holding every icon of the property, and the logo-lovers — the orange-hat lifers — who wanted something that felt Mauna Kea without feeling like a promotional product. One scarf couldn't serve them both.

So I proposed two collections. They said yes.

Presenting those collections remains one of the proudest moments of this entire ride — not because of the palm trees on silk, but because a place that spends generations earning loyalty trusted a newcomer from Atlanta to translate it.

And before you know it, you're wearing a bright orange plumeria hat on the flight home, already dreaming about when you can go back.

Custom silk for a place with a story? Meet The Studio.