The Australian Financial Review | Bonnie Campbell
Barry Walker and his family rewrote their rule book when they fell in love with Fiji and created an island hideaway. They’re now selling their passion project.
When AFR Weekend calls Barry Walker to discuss the sale of his private island in Fiji, he is negotiating LA traffic and running late for school pick-up. After a couple of drop-outs, the video call stabilises to show Walker sitting idle in what is presumably a world-famous LA traffic jam.
Our call has been delayed several times after wildfires ripped through the entrepreneur’s home town where he runs his cannabis company, Dub Bros, which is one of the largest licence holders in California.
While his own home was left unscathed, Walker has been helping friends and family get back on their feet. The entertainment capital is now dealing with an unexpected aftermath of the fires: rain and mud.
“It’s been impossible to travel through Malibu, the canyons are closed down indefinitely. I’ve never seen anything like it, it was a pretty rough couple of weeks,” Walker says.
Fires, mud and traffic chaos are a world away from the subject of our call: Vawa, the private island nestled in Fiji’s Yasawa islands – and its recent arrival on the exclusive Fijian private island market.
When we move on from LA weather and begin discussing his private island, Walker’s demeanour visibly and audibly shifts from stressed to psyched.
“Everything that we did, would I do it again? I don’t know,” he says. “Am I happy I did it once and created an absolute jewel at the edge of the world? Absolutely!”
Then, his voice cracks.
A 300-square-metre hardwood deck wraps around a 150,000-litre pool, lined in French travertine tiles.
“I get emotional because it was such a great experience, it was phenomenal.”
Now, $US15 million ($24 million) can buy you a 30-hectare luxury foothold into the informal club of island-owning billionaires in the South Pacific archipelago. The club includes Google co-founder Larry Page, Austrian Red Bull co-founder Dietrich Mateschitz and the family of late Australian developer Lang Walker, who created his own private island utopia called Kokomo. Then there’s actor and director Mel Gibson, who has owned Fijian island Mago since 2005.
It was almost a decade ago when Walker, his wife, Shauna, and their two children decided to travel to Fiji instead of Europe for their annual vacation.
“We had a rule that we would never go back to a place for a second time, and we would always immerse ourselves in the culture, whether it was Istanbul, Antibes in France, or the islands of Greece,” Walker explains.
However, that trip to Fiji was enough to make the Walkers rewrite their family rule book.
“We went to Fiji, and we were like, ‘but is there a culture? Will it be all five-star hotels?’ So we really went all around Fiji and went to all the different areas and all the different island chains.
“At the Yasawas, we found the most beautiful and sweetest people in the world. The next year we were like, ‘What do you think, should we just do Fiji again?’”
The home, which features six-metre high ceilings encased in category 5 cyclone-rated glass sliders and windows, was constructed by Australian builder Kyronn.
So blissful was the Walkers’ experience, they began to muse about creating a permanent link to the string of volcanic islands off the western edge of Fiji, made famous as the tropical backdrop in 1980 film The Blue Lagoonfeaturing Brooke Shields.
“We left there thinking maybe we buy a little piece of sand, this is nice, and that turned into a private island of course,” Walker laughs.
In a serendipitous twist, a Fiji-based friend sent Walker a pic of Vawa, which he’d glimpsed off a beach on Yasawa Island.
“Six months later I was sent a photo and someone said, ‘You’re not going to believe what’s on the market,’” Walker recalls. “I was like, wait a minute, that’s that island!”
Barry and Shauna Walker pictured on Vawa Island.
All of a sudden, the foreign concept of owning a private island morphed into a visceral and tantalising possibility.
“I don’t know if it’s just being a guy, or if we’re just monkeys and we want to be kings – but that’s every young boy’s dream, to own an island, right? To create our own country, you know, so all those little triggers, those little bells started ringing, all my little spider senses started tingling, and it was an absolute dream come true.”
Walker says that until Vawa, the idea of owning his own island hadn’t occurred to him.
“You try not to dream too big – I’d never even thought of it.”
When dreams become reality
The Walkers met local chiefs to ensure their plans aligned with the community.
“They want opportunities for the village, opportunities to capture some revenue, they want a future for their kids, and they want jobs for them,” Walker says.
The family paid about $US2 million for the island, taking over the 99-year lease from the previous owner, a New Zealand-based billionaire.
However, the cost was just the beginning. Besides the abundance of natural beauty – think palm groves and sandy beaches sliding into Bombay Sapphire-blue water – there was no infrastructure.
Walker says they blew the construction budget several times.
“Our budget was always going to be wrong because we didn’t realise we were going to build a city.
“We weren’t just building a bathroom, we were building all the plumbing, all the sanitation, and you can’t just pump it out into the water.”
“We ended up with the most incredible, luxurious, open floor plan, all windows, indoor-outdoor California contemporary house,” says Shauna Walker.
The house itself looks more Malibu mansion than traditional bamboo and palm-leaf thatched Fijian bure.
The initial Danish architect designed a small structure with few windows, but the couple revised up the scale and ratio of glass to wall several times. The result was what Walker described as a “huge aquarium”.
The home – which features six-metre ceilings at the highest point encased in category 5 cyclone-rated glass sliders and windows – was constructed by Australian builder Kyronn.
A 300-square-metre hardwood deck wraps around a 150,000-litre pool, lined in French travertine tiles, while each of the four bedrooms has an outdoor en suite with a Moroccan-tiled shower.
Shauna – who spoke to AFR Weekend from an artist’s residency in Morocco – says she still can’t believe they pulled it off.
“We imported everything down to every detail and ended up with the most incredible, luxurious, open floor plan, all windows, indoor-outdoor California contemporary house,” she says.
The Walkers enlisted LA artists to create one-of-a-kind concrete seats, and added crushed abalone shell into the concrete mix to make bathroom surfaces sparkle. Furniture was imported in several shipping containers from Morocco, France, Indonesia, Hungary and two from the United States.
When they weren’t using it, Vawa was rented out as a private holiday escape for about $US25,000 per night.
Now, the Walkers’ South Pacific passion project is nearing an end due to a change in their family situation.
“My wife and I are getting divorced, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking. I think we will sell the island, I think that kind of has to happen,” Walker says.
Despite the parting of ways, Barry and Shauna say they retain precious memories like camping on the beach and swimming with turtles.
Barry recalls one particular evening mingling over kava and stargazing.
“I had some workers there, seven or eight guys, and when we have seven or eight guys it’s like ‘bosso, can we bring out the kava?’ and I’m like ‘absolutely!’
“We sit out on the deck and the moon is full, and I break out the telescope, and the thing about astronomy is it transcends all languages. I was looking through the eyehole, and you see the craters on the moon, and you see the seven moons of Venus, like diamonds perfectly in line.”
Shauna says Vawa offered a pristine antidote to harried modern life.
“Time slows way down when I am there with my family, and it’s delicious. It has always been an incredible opportunity to connect, to be present together, and to marvel at this beautiful life.”
Vawa is on offer with Forbes’ Ken Jacobs and Tracey Atkins, who have co-listed it with Rick Kermode at Bayleys New Zealand and Farhad Vladi at Vladi Private Islands.
