Across Beretania Street from the Hawaiʻi State Capitol, behind a white iron fence and a row of tall palms, sits the house where Hawaiʻi’s last queen lived for 55 years. Washington Place looks quiet from the sidewalk, white columns and shade trees behind an iron fence. Few houses anywhere have seen this much history. Lydia Kamakaʻeha Pākī arrived here as a bride in 1862, became Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1891, lost her kingdom in 1893, was arrested on this property in 1895, and passed away in her bedroom upstairs in 1917. After her death the house served as the official residence for twelve governors of Hawaiʻi, hosted presidents and royalty, and today it stands as a National Historic Landmark that still hosts state functions. We think it holds more Hawaiian history per square foot than almost any building in the islands, and this year it entered a new chapter: a top to bottom restoration that has the house closed to tours while the work gets done. Here is the full story, and what you can still see in 2026.
Related: ʻIolani Palace: The 1893 Overthrow That Ended the Hawaiian Kingdom | Aliʻiōlani Hale: The Palace That Became a Courthouse (1874) | Queen Emma Summer Palace: The Real Story of Hānaiakamalama (1848)
A Sea Captain’s Gamble on Beretania Street (1842-1847)
The story starts with Captain John Dominis, an Italian American ship captain and trader who worked the Pacific routes in the 1830s and 1840s. He bought the lot on Beretania Street from the British consul, Richard Charlton, for 600 dollars, and in 1842 he started building the finest private home Honolulu had seen. He spared nothing. The ground floor walls went up in coral stone, the upper story in wood frame, with two tiers of verandas wrapping the house and Tuscan columns holding up the roofline. The master carpenter was Isaac Hart, the same New England builder responsible for the first ʻIolani Palace. The floor plan followed the symmetrical Georgian style popular back east, then adapted itself to island life with those deep, breezy lanais on every side.
In 1846, with the house nearly finished, Dominis sailed for Manila and China aboard the brig William Neilson on one more trading run, the voyage that was supposed to cover his construction debts. The ship never arrived. He was lost at sea, and his wife Mary and their teenage son John Owen moved into the completed mansion in 1847 without him.
The Name Kamehameha III Made Permanent (1848)
Mary Dominis needed income to keep the house, so she rented rooms to some of the most connected men in the kingdom. Her first boarder was Anthony Ten Eyck, the United States Commissioner to the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, who ran the American diplomatic legation right out of the house. In 1848 Ten Eyck suggested naming the home Washington Place in honor of George Washington, and King Kamehameha III approved it with one condition written into the record: the house would keep that name in all time coming. It still does, 178 years later.
Other boarders left their own marks on Hawaiʻi. William Little Lee lived here from 1849 to 1854 while serving as the kingdom’s first chief justice and president of the Board of Land Commissioners, the body that carried out the Māhele land division of 1848. Robert Crichton Wyllie, the kingdom’s long serving foreign minister, stayed here too. Mary Dominis planted what is credited as the first European style private garden in Honolulu, and she gets credit for something a little more festive as well: histories of the house say she introduced Honolulu to the decorated Christmas tree, candles and all. She lived at Washington Place until her death in April 1889.
The Bride Who Became a Queen (1862-1891)
In 1862 John Owen Dominis, the captain’s son, married Lydia Kamakaʻeha Pākī, a high ranking aliʻi raised in the Chiefs’ Children’s School alongside the future kings and queens of Hawaiʻi. John had grown up next to that world; he arrived in Honolulu as a boy in 1837 and went to school beside Hawaiian royalty. The newlyweds moved into Washington Place with his mother, and Lydia would call the house home for the next 55 years. She later described it in her memoir as “a choice tropical retreat in the midst of the chief city of the Hawaiian Islands.”
John Owen rose through the kingdom’s government, serving as Governor of Oʻahu and later of Maui. Lydia composed music constantly during these years, including Aloha ʻOe, written in 1878 after a visit to Maunawili on the windward side. When her brother King Kalākaua died in January 1891, Lydia ascended the throne as Queen Liliʻuokalani and moved to ʻIolani Palace, the official royal residence two blocks away. Seven months later John Owen died at Washington Place on August 27, 1891, and the house passed to the Queen. She kept it as her private retreat while the political storm around her monarchy gathered.
The Overthrow Comes Home (1893-1896)
On January 17, 1893, a group of mostly American businessmen and politicians, backed by United States Marines landed from the USS Boston, deposed Queen Liliʻuokalani in a coup that ended the Hawaiian Kingdom. We covered that day hour by hour in our ʻIolani Palace post, so here we will stay with the house. The Queen left the palace and moved back to Washington Place as a private citizen, and her home became the quiet center of royalist Hawaiʻi.
Two years later the house witnessed the most painful chapter of her life. In January 1895 royalists attempted an armed counter revolution to restore the throne. It collapsed within days. Authorities then found a cache of firearms buried in the garden at Washington Place, and on January 16, 1895, they arrested the deposed queen at her own home. She was tried by a military tribunal of the Republic of Hawaiʻi inside her former throne room at ʻIolani Palace, found guilty, fined 5,000 dollars, and sentenced to five years at hard labor. The sentence was commuted to imprisonment in an upstairs bedroom of the palace.
While she was a prisoner, on January 24, 1895, she signed a formal abdication of her throne. She wrote afterward that she signed to save the lives of her jailed supporters, several of whom faced death sentences that were later commuted. During nearly eight months confined in that room she composed Ke Aloha o Ka Haku, known today as the Queen’s Prayer, still sung in Hawaiian churches every Sunday. In September 1895 she was released back to Washington Place under house arrest, which lasted until February 1896, and a full pardon later that year restored her civil rights.
Fighting Annexation From the Parlor (1896-1898)
With her rights restored, Liliʻuokalani took the fight to Washington, D.C. She sailed for the United States in December 1896 and spent much of the next two years pressing her case against annexation with officials in the American capital. Back home, Hawaiians organized one of the most remarkable petition drives in the islands’ history. In 1897 the Hui Aloha ʻĀina gathered 21,269 signatures opposing annexation, collected by riders and boats reaching every district, an enormous share of the Native Hawaiian population at the time. Delegates carried the Kūʻē Petitions to the United States Senate, and the annexation treaty died in February 1898 without the votes to pass. That same season the Queen published Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, her memoir and her argument to the American public.
Then the Spanish American War changed the calculation in Washington, and Congress annexed Hawaiʻi by joint resolution in July 1898. On August 12, 1898, the Hawaiian flag came down over ʻIolani Palace at the formal transfer ceremony. Liliʻuokalani refused to attend. She stayed inside Washington Place with family and loyal friends, and most Hawaiians stayed away from the ceremony as well. The petitions she and her people raised sat in the National Archives for a century until scholar Noenoe K. Silva brought them back to light in the late 1990s.
The Queen’s Last Years (1898-1917)
Washington Place settled into a rhythm after annexation: the deposed queen at home among her people, still every inch their aliʻi. Every September her birthday drew crowds. For her 63rd, in 1901, guests arrived from across the island, the Royal Hawaiian Band serenaded her, and a lūʻau was served in tents on the grounds. Her hānai children, Joseph Aʻea, John Dominis ʻAimoku, and Lydia Aholo, lived with her, and when ʻAimoku married, his three children were born in the house, filling the old rooms with grandchildren.
On December 2, 1909, she signed the deed that created the Liliʻuokalani Trust, dedicating her estate to the care of orphaned and destitute children, with preference given to Hawaiian keiki. That trust still operates today, more than a century of her legacy at work for Hawaiian children and families. She suffered a stroke and died at Washington Place on November 11, 1917, at age 79. After a state funeral, her casket was carried in a grand procession up Nuʻuanu Avenue to Mauna ʻAla, the Royal Mausoleum, about 2 miles (3.2 km) from her front gate. As she was laid to rest with her royal family, a children’s choir sang Aloha ʻOe.
Twelve Governors and a Lei on an Empty Chair (1918-2002)
A few months after the Queen’s passing, Governor Charles McCarthy leased the house, and in 1921 the Territory of Hawaiʻi purchased it from her estate. From 1918 to 2002, twelve territorial and state governors in a row lived at Washington Place, and their families each left something behind. McCarthy’s wife began a tradition that continues today: fresh lei draped on the armchair where the Queen once received her birthday guests. Governor Farrington added the enclosed glass lanai and the porte cochere in the 1920s. Governor Judd oversaw the Aloha ʻOe monument near the Beretania Street gate in 1929, funded by one dollar donations from the public through the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
The house has its wartime scar too. On the morning of December 7, 1941, a shell landed near Washington Place at about 9:30 a.m. while Governor Poindexter was home. He was unhurt; a man across Beretania Street was killed. The guest book from the governor years reads like a world history course. Franklin D. Roosevelt was feted here in 1934, the first sitting president entertained at the house. Shirley Temple sang here on her 1935 visit, Eleanor Roosevelt addressed war volunteers on the patio in 1943, Harry Truman played the piano after dinner, and Queen Elizabeth II dined here during the Ariyoshi years.
Still the Executive Mansion, Now a Museum Too (2002 to Today)
In 2002 a new private residence, later named Hale Kiaʻāina, was completed on the grounds, and Governor Linda Lingle became the first governor to live in it. That freed the historic mansion for official state functions and public tours. Washington Place had already been listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, and in 2007 it was designated a National Historic Landmark. In December 2017 the second floor, the former private quarters, opened to tour groups for the first time, and in 2022 a multimedia exhibit on the Queen’s life was installed in the renovated gallery. The property covers 3.1 acres (1.25 hectares), with the historic house itself spanning about 17,000 square feet (1,580 square meters).
Visiting Washington Place in 2026
Timing is the big caveat this year. The house closed in February 2026 for a 9 million dollar restoration, the largest in decades, with about 22 projects on the list: new air conditioning, roof repairs, fire sprinklers and alarms, and repair of termite damaged wood. The state expects the work to run through October 2027, with a chance of limited tour windows before then, so check the official calendar before you build it into your day.
The sidewalk view still delivers. From Beretania Street you can see the white mansion through the fence along with the grounds the Queen loved, and the Aloha ʻOe monument stands near the gate. The surrounding blocks hold the densest concentration of Hawaiian history anywhere: ʻIolani Palace and the Kamehameha statue across the way, Kawaiahaʻo Church two blocks toward the harbor, and the bronze statue of Queen Liliʻuokalani standing between the palace and the Capitol, usually wearing fresh lei.
Washington Place: 320 S. Beretania St., Honolulu, in the Hawaiʻi Capital Historic District. Tours are free when offered and run by reservation through the official Washington Place site, which also posts restoration updates. Pair the sidewalk stop with the ʻIolani Palace tour across the street and you can walk the entire story of the monarchy’s last chapter in a single morning. The name on the gate is still the one Kamehameha III approved in 1848, in all time coming.
More from Wanderlustyle
- Kawaiahaʻo Church: The Coral Church of the Aliʻi (1842)
- Puʻuloa: The Hawaiian History of Pearl Harbor Before 1941
- The Battle of Nuʻuanu: How Kamehameha Took Oʻahu in 1795
- The Story of SPAM in Hawaiʻi: How a Wartime Ration Became a Local Icon
- Chinatown Honolulu: History, Markets, and How to Visit
Comments are closed.