ZENSTONE

The last day at General Motors, Bobby swiped his badge out of advanced transmission service engineering at the old Willow Run assembly plant — the same building where Henry Ford once assembled B-24 Liberator bombers for World War Two — and skipped across the parking lot toward a different life entirely.

He and Ming Wei landed on the Big Island with a pop-up camper, five raw acres on the Hamakua Coast, no power, a county waterline, and two dogs. They dragged an old steel culvert up from the gulch with a tractor and used it as a garage. The first rainy season arrived like a biblical event — forty days and nights of rain so heavy Bobby thought the trailer might wash away in the night. Every bug in the forest that had never seen dry land found its way inside the canvas walls.

Ming Wei found them a lifeline — two nights in a hotel in Hilo. The occasion: an International Bamboo Conference at Uncle Billy's on Banyan Drive. Bobby walked in and knew immediately. These are my people.

Colombia, Australia, Japan, Korea — bamboo builders and architects from around the world were presenting. He met Dean Johnston, the architect who helped get five bamboo species into the building code. He met David Sands of Bamboo Living. He met Rich Von Welsheim from Whispering Winds Bamboo on Maui. He and Ming Wei were on the dance floor at night, in everyone's rooms until dawn. He was bitten — completely, irreversibly.

Dean Johnston invited them to Maui. They went for a week and absorbed everything. Back on the Big Island, Bobby found Leimana Pelton — a bamboo elder who had a van with a seized engine and knowledge Bobby needed. He made an offer: teach me joinery, and I'll get that engine out. He kept his word. Lying in the wet, mosquito-infested ground in Kalapana, he worked until the engine came free. Leimana showed him the joinery. Bobby went home and bought the tools — hole saws, chisels — and never stopped practicing.

That led to the first outdoor bamboo classroom at the Salvation Army in Honoka'a. Then four more around the island. Then the Dom Pérignon Stargate. Then wedding arches on clifftops above the Pacific. Then torii gates at festivals under the Big Island sky.

The path to bamboo came through decades of martial arts, Asian philosophy, and a deep love for the Japanese aesthetic — the lantern in the garden, the raked gravel, the stone that sits like a small mountain with the bamboo fence breathing vertically behind it.

Bobby sees stone and bamboo the way a chemist sees acid and alkali — not as opposites at war, but as opposites in conversation. Stone is the horizontal, the grounded, the ancient and permanent. Bamboo is the vertical, the elevated, the alive and flexible. Neither can do what the other does. Together they create a field — a space with energy, with meaning, with the kind of stillness that asks you to slow down.

Bobby does not work with bamboo the way most people work with it. He harvests at the correct moon phase. He cures properly. He studies the joinery traditions of Japan, Colombia, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia — and brings his own design sensibility to each connection. A hole saw, a chisel, a threaded rod pinning beam to post — the geometry has to be right or the structure breathes wrong.

The black bamboo — Dendrocalamus Asper Hitam and Gigantochloa Atroviolacea (Atro black) — two great timber black bamboos, beeswax-polished, cut on steep diagonals, the cut face revealing the interior grain — this is the signature material of the ZENSTONE atelier. It ages like fine furniture. It carries light differently at every hour of the day. It is, in Bobby's hands, not a building material but a medium.

ZENSTONE is not only large-scale. The same sensibility that designs a pavilion on a lava rock wall above the ocean applies to a candle vessel cut from black bamboo — the steep diagonal faces, the beeswax interior, the legs angled just so. An object that belongs on a resort table, in a lobby, in the home of someone who understands that the small things carry as much intention as the large ones.

The outdoor shower torii. The bamboo railing with ocean beyond. The privacy screen woven from small-diameter culm. Each piece is made once, made right, and made to last long past the hands that built it.

ZENSTONE works with luxury homeowners, resort designers, architects, and anyone who feels the call to something more intentional in their outdoor space. Each project begins with a conversation — about the land, the light, the life that will happen in the space — and ends with something that could not have been built by anyone else.

The full ZENSTONE zen garden — stone and bamboo in complete conversation, raked gravel and lanterns and the torii gate in the distance — is still being manifested. The work at Puako on the Kohala Coast is where it will come fully to life: a proof-of-concept that brings together everything Bobby has studied, built, and carried across decades and continents.

The bamboo grows fastest in the season after it has been rooted longest. The roots go very deep here.