As well as Jennifer Coolidge, season one’s pitch-perfect cast included Connie Britton of Nashville fame and the immaculate Murray Bartlett as highly complicated hotel manager Armond, but really it was all about creator/writer/director Mike White—and the location, that is: the very real Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.
The two came together when HBO asked White to dream up a show that could be made under covid guidelines. With a single location a necessity, his thoughts turned to childhood holidays, which for him were in Hawaii. He liked the place so much, he bought a house at Hanalei on Kauai, and the recent arrival of billionaire ‘tech bros’ as his neighbors fed into the story. “At first, it’s, like, ‘It’s so beautiful! I’m in touch with nature and it’s so healing,’” he told The New Yorker. “Then you realize it’s on the backs of people who’ve had a complicated history with people like me.” The result was The White Lotus, written at speed in August 2020 and filmed at leisure from October to December, with cast and crew quarantined in the resort for the duration.
Opened in 1990, the Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea lives up to the tropical-paradise clichés with ease, with some of the suites we see in the show costing up to $26,000 a night. Alongside the 380 guest rooms and suites, its 15 acres house three pools, three restaurants (including Wolfgang Puck’s Spago), three golf courses, a spa and an art museum. Amazingly, White and his crew were given almost free rein, from the entrance and lobby to the restaurants, the spa and even the neighboring Wailea Beach.
Key to the drama are the suites, all carefully decorated to reflect their occupants while keeping to strict ground rules laid down by the resort. While they couldn’t paint the rooms, they could change the materials, bedding and curtains – an important factor, as production designer Laura Fox explained to Architectural Digest: “They’re lovely rooms, but not to film in. I think [my job] was trying to find a version of a new hotel that was kitschy and flawed and rich, like the characters.”
The Palm Suite, home-from-home to honeymooners Shane (Jake Lacy) and Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), is one of the resort’s Elite Oceanfront Suites – given what Fox called an ‘anti-beach’ makeover with vintage greens, velvet and hanging lights. The White Lotus’s other honeymoon suite, the Pineapple, is the Lokelani Presidential Suite – at 4,500 square feet, the hotel’s (and Hawaii’s) largest, with three bedrooms, five bathrooms and two living rooms. This was given a palette of yellow, green and brown with, of course, pineapple motifs.
For volatile Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who arrives with her mother’s ashes in a plastic bag, the Hibiscus Suite was created in one of the Oceanfront Prime Suites, with pinks and reds expressly designed to clash with her sartorial fondness for bright prints. Then, for the Mossbacher family, led by tech exec Nicole (Britton), the Tradewinds Suite was created from the Maile Presidential Suite, with a range of blues and very Seventies Hawaiian art. This was the biggest departure from the real hotel: in the show’s Tradewinds, the Mossbacher kids sleep in the living room, but the Maile is in fact the Four Seasons Maui’s second-largest suite, with three bedrooms, four bathrooms and full sauna included.
Wailea Beach
Outside the rooms and restaurants, it’s water that matters. Beach scenes focusing on Quinn Mossbacher (Fred Hechinger) were filmed on Wailea Beach – steps away from the hotel, just as we see on screen. For the swimming pools, meanwhile, the action focused on two of the three, leaving the child-friendly Waterfall Pool in the background. For Quinn and his father’s scuba lessons, it’s the Fountain Pool, which sits at the centre of the property. We spend plenty of time at the Serenity Pool, where Shane and Rachel take a cabana, the Mossbacher girls read waterside and Quinn is seen wading to the swim-up bar carrying his phone and console at arm’s length, like holy relics.
