Spalding House

Spalding House, also known as the Cooke-Spalding House was an art museum and sculpture garden in Honolulu, Hawaii (now closed). It was called Nuumealani (heavenly terrace) by Anna Rice Cooke, who commissioned it. The house and gardens constituted a 3+1⁄2-acre former art museum in the Makiki Heights district of Honolulu.

Spalding House was built as a residence in 1925 by Mrs. Cooke, the widow of Charles Montague Cooke, a local businessman and missionary descendant. At the same time, the Honolulu Academy of Art (later renamed Honolulu Museum of Art), which Mrs. Cooke endowed, was being built on the site of her former home on Beretania Street in Honolulu. The Makiki Heights home was designed by Hart Wood and later enlarged by the firm of Bertram Goodhue and Associates. In 1950, Cooke's daughter, Alice Spalding (Mrs. Phillip Spalding), engaged Vladimir Ossipoff to remodel the ground floor.^[1] The Honolulu Museum of Art acquired the estate as a bequest from Alice Spalding in 1968 and operated it as an annex for the display of Japanese prints from 1970 to 1978. In the late 1970s, it was sold to a subsidiary of The Honolulu Advertiser. In 1986, the Thurston Twigg-Smith family converted it to The Contemporary Museum. Following interior renovation, the museum, with its doors by artists Robert Graham and Tony Berlant, opened to the public in October 1988.^[2][3]

On May 2, 2011, The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu ceased to exist as an independent entity, and is now known as the Honolulu Museum of Art Spalding House. The Honolulu Academy of Art acquired Spalding House along with its collections of more than 3,000 works of art.^[4] The Makiki Heights building, which has about 5,000 square feet of gallery space, reassumed its former name, “Spalding House." Around that time the Honolulu Academy of Art rebranded itself Honolulu Museum of Art.