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A relaxed, friendly & beautiful place in Honiara
  
 
 
 
 
 
 

The building of Rain Tree Cafe...

 
only a dream to begin with  
The white river site was a mess when we moved onto it. The site had been used as a kind of dumping ground as means for reclamation. There was an incomplete building: a timber structure at the back and a besser block and cement slab structure on the front with no roof. We had a vision that we could renovate this building and this site into something beautiful. We wanted to to do it using local skills and in as sustainable a way as possible with our limited budget and what was available in Honiara. While the original building left a lot to be desired its best feature was the massive rain tree that it had been built around. It was obvious from the beginning the rain tree had to stay and would be the central feature of the cafe.

big clean up needed

 
seni at work

We started work with Senni and some young guys from Cynthias village. We cleaned the site up - it was a real mess of old building materials. But we didn't throw away anthing - and in the end a lot of these materials were very useful. New parts of the structure and modified internal walls were done with recycled local timber. Where ever possible we used bamboo from Kakabona village down the road as a material for its beauty and functionality. We worked wth the locals to salvage vasa timber from long defunt logging operations near Bonege and got local chainsaw operators to cut slabs for bench tops - something they had never done before.

rafters going up leaf roof
The cafe eating area didn't have a roof yet. So we built onto the existing roof trusses, raised it up and built a traditional sago palm leaf roof with round mamafua poles, bamboo rafters and laywer cane bindings onto the top of it. The sago palm was done in the traditional way with wild betel nut trunks for folding the thatch on and palm mid rib for 'stitching'.
kitchen ready for moving in kitchen open
The existing half besser block walls were finished with sawment extensions, painting, wiring was done by Anderson from Willies Electrical - our trusted local electrician. We ordered some catering equipment from QCC in Brisbane and made our own furniture. Sinks and kitchen, gas and eletrical appliances were all sourced locally. We decided to use a compost toilet to minimise the chance of effluent getting into the ocean and to demonstrate this simple technology.
michel and first mahogony otto from bougainville
A big part of the project from the beginning has the been the site regeneration. Friends and visitors have been helping us since 2003 2ith planting of trees and removing the enormous amount of steel, plastic and other waste on the site and foreshore. Above left Michel Fanton from Seed Savers Network plants a mahogony seedling; right: Otto Namson, a forest and sustainable agriculture activist from Bougainville plants a fruit tree - a rare type of South American sapote.
building around a tree guesthouse sawment walls

We were determined to keep the rain tree and turn it into a feature item but it tried to give it a bit more room to grow. The existing timber framework for the back part of the building - to become the bed and breakfast -was infilled with 'sawment'. Sawment is a more sustainable, low cost and very nice feeling materials made from sawdust, cement and sand. It has very good thermal properties and ends up feeling a bit like a mud brick or rammed earth house. Oyr friend Emma Stone introduced us to the method common in northern NSW by owner builders on alternative type communities. Its perfect for solomons in that its labour intensive, makes use of readily available waste material (sawdust and sand) and its lower cost than the traditional fibro and masonite system which is all imported.

car park and garden sisters helping with work
Cynthias sisters all chipped in for much of the work on the painting. Unfortunately there was no source of more organic paints and so we used acrylic. On a lot of the timber we finished it with linseed oil and local bees wax. But in heavy traffic areas we used polyurethane.
open for business owners first meal with friends

When the cafe opened we were all excited. Cynthia had started recruiting and training relatives from her home village in Malaita and local ladies from nearby Kakabona. They did Pizza takeaways out of our house for a while and then moved in when it was ready. Just before opening we celebrated and also farewelled our friends Stav and Peter who had been working with AusAID/RAMSI and were about to head home.