An excerpt from Chapter 12, of The Last American Heiresses:

The pleasure palace called Shangri La that Doris built on Oahu, on the other side of Diamond Head from Honolulu, was inspired by the art and architecture of the Near East and Far East. But rather than strictly historical, its design reflected a mix of styles including Moghul, Seljuk, and Ottoman, as well as faux versions of those styles. The project began in 1935, when Doris and Cromwell were on their honeymoon trip around the world, which had been planned to take four weeks and wound up lasting nine months, culminating with a long stay in the United States territory of Hawaii. Lush and fragrant, populated with warm and friendly people, Hawaii seemed to offer more privacy and relaxation than Doris had previously been aware of needing. Instantly she felt at home there. From their suite at the Royal Hawaiian, she and Cromwell spent weeks roaming the island, looking for a suitable place to build, until at last they found a spot that sang to them, a promontory overlooking the Pacific in Honolulu’s exclusive Black Point residential neighborhood. Doris hired architect Marion Sims Wyeth, the same architect who had designed Mar-a-Lago, to work with her on the house’s design. She also bought a large, dockside warehouse on Honolulu Harbor, which would function as a depository for all the larger, museum-level Islamic artifacts and architectural elements she was buying or commissioning from artists, artisans, workshops, and dealers in India, Iran, Morocco, Spain, and the like.

When finished, Shangri La was basically a modernist house onto which all these elements had been applied. The interior was a fantasy-like succession of dazzling salons, terraces, courtyards, and pavilions, whose tranquil atmosphere was enhanced by delicately carved marble wall screens, inlaid with semiprecious stones in floral patterns; lattice-work windows admitting jewel-like beams of light through panes that shimmered in pink and green and lavender; florid mosaic panels depicting mythical gardens; soaring antique columns; massively scaled carved wood doors; elaborately coffered and painted ceilings; an oak floor imported from a sixteenth-century French château; an eleventh-century Moorish mantelpiece purchased from William Randolph Hearst. . . . It may have been located in a territory that was known as a playground for the rich, but for Doris, this was no vacation house. Shangri La was a refuge, a retreat far from New York nightclubs and newspapers, which is why she named it after the legendary domain of beauty and harmony where people did not grow old, as described in the popular 1937 movie of the same name and the 1933 novel by James Hilton that the movie was based on.

“This is the heart of the house,” said Doris, on a small detour through her own bedroom suite. The sitting room featured a small fountain with a delicate acequia—or Moorish-style water channel set into the floor—streaming out to a pool in Doris’s private lanai, which gave onto a larger terraced garden that was built around a lily pond. Her octagonal bathroom of white marble accented with jade featured a fancifully vaulted ceiling, studded with tiny mirrors, worthy of a palace or temple.

“Don’t worry—your bathroom is nice, too,” said Doris, noticing Barbara looking up in wonder. “This one is Moghul. The one in the guesthouse where I’m putting you is Moorish—from a twelfth-century palace in Córdoba….”