Spirit of Aloha | Articles | Here's Hawai'i | January/February 2004

Under the Hula Moon

Marvels of Precision

Ricardo and Judy Dellera at their Kalihi Kai studio, where some of the Islands' finest wood art is created, including intricately inlaid pool cues.

During a brief stint as a waiter in Berkeley in 1969, Ricardo Dellera spotted an ad: "San Francisco to Honolulu, one way, $79." Dellera didn't think twice. He sold his Volkswagen van to buy the ticket, moved to Hawai'i with a degree in biology and a minor in math and wound up changing forever the way we store our treasures and appreciate wood.

Dellera's koa boxes have been a mainstay in Hawai'i galleries for 20 years, long before koa became a buzzword and woodworking the rage that it is today. It was only recently, however, when I met him at his Kalihi Kai studio, that I realized why a Dellera koa box occupies its own singular place in a crowded and competitive field. There is the craftsmanship: the luminous grain that he coaxes out of the wood; the seamless dovetail splines, difficult to make, and his trademark corner joint; and the surprises, such as the invisible drawers and the lustrous grain that wraps horizontally around the four sides of a jewelry chest.

The man behind the work is a 60-year-old surfer who has worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in Swaziland, a teacher of emotionally disturbed teenagers and a woodworker. The son of an artist, Walter Dellera, and Helen Jepson, star soprano for the New York Metropolitan Opera House in the 1930s, this is a man with the soul of a poet, the mind of a mathematician and the steely focus of a monk.

"I make fancy pool cues," Dellera announces as I walk past walls lined with surfboards and koa planks. "This cue is spalted koa with ebony and rolled Irish linen. This one is koa with abalone and ebony. This is Makassar ebony from the Celebes Sea off of Indonesia." The highly desired patterns in the spalted koa, much like pen-and-ink drawings, he explains, come from a fungus that grows in the wood and is destroyed by drying in a kiln.

The two-piece cues are a marvel of beauty, balance and mathematical precision, with difficult points and angles and flawless multiple inlays. One has a veneer of pink ivory, one of the most expensive woods available. Another has intricate inlays of silver, ebony and an artificial ivory named ivorine. Using specially modified lathes, Dellera has spent the past decade perfecting his workmanship in this esoteric art.

Dellera's cue sticks are custom ordered, but his koa boxes are more widely available in galleries such as Nohea Galleries, which has featured his work since he began. Ranging from 5-by-10-by-2-inches deep to 16-by-12-by-10-inches, the boxes are heirloom quality and are wonderful to touch, as much a tactile as a visual experience. Run your hands over a jewelry box and you'll find that its drawers, joints and seams are undetectable, that every part moves fluidly and that the finish is as fine as silk. "We go down to a 600 grit on the sanding-it's really, really fine," he says. "Then we burnish it on a buffer. You'll never, ever see a scratch."

Judy Dellera, Ricardo's wife, addresses a common concern: the sustainability of koa. "All of our wood comes from one supplier, and it's all salvaged from dead or dying trees," she says. "We can use wood that isn't useful to anyone else." From a moribund tree to a Dellera box, what a remarkable journey.

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