Before I start, let me be clear: we do not have any tiki culture decor here at the island place. HA, as far as I know, owns neither any grass skirts nor a coconut shell bra. Still, I realized, living here may be the culmination of my Enchanted Tiki Room fantasy.
If you’ve never experienced the Tiki Room, there is, of course, a YouTube video of the experience, though it can’t capture the magic.
I was five years old and visiting Disneyland a couple of months after the Tiki Room opened. I was fascinated by automation, and the Tiki Room was all about Audio-Animatronics. It was also air-conditioned, a rarity at that time, and you got to sit down and rest your feet after hours spent waiting in line. But to my five-year-old self, it was the tiki vibe, the tropical plants inside and cleverly placed outside the fake windows to make it appear that the Tiki Room was in the middle of the jungle. And the thundershowers! It all blew me away. I embraced American tiki culture for much of my early childhood.
We had a thundershower the other morning, and while lying in bed looking through some of the many windows in the bedroom, I realized that the windows were the reality that the Tiki Room tried to emulate. There was also birdsong and a general tropical feel.
But, please, we keep the birds and bamboo outside, and (except for one tiki-inspired concrete planter we recently unearthed while working on the front landscaping) there’s no faux-Polynesian iconography around.
—2p