In 2007, the celebrated stunt helicopter pilot Fred North was flying a sequence for the movie Tropic Thunder above the Hawaiian island of Kauai. “I flew all over the island,” recalls North, whose film credits include Mission: Impossible, The Fast and the Furious and James Bond: Spectre, along with roughly 200 others. “That’s when I discovered Kauai, and it blew my mind,” he says. “The scenery is from another world.”

Soon after, North and his wife Peggy began to look for a holiday house for themselves and their children. For multiple years, he says, the family rented houses as they sought out their ideal home. “We didn’t just want a house,” he says. “We wanted this house.”

In 2016 they found the single-storey contemporary house designed by the architect Gary Tobey. “It’s a mix of amazing lines and contemporary design, but at the same time it has traditional Hawaiian accents in there, with simplicity and luxury,” North says.

The family moved in immediately, flying from their primary home in Los Angeles to visit their new vacation home at least once a month. After buying two extra empty lots in 2022, they’ve extended the property to a total of about 13.5 acres. 

But now, North finds himself increasingly pulled back to Europe. “We have family in France, and they’re not necessarily in their pristine, young years,” he says. “We need to be closer to them.” As a result, he’s listed the house for US$10.1 million with Amy Frazier of Hawai’i Life. 

Discovering the island

North began his career covering rally car races (Paris-Dakar is probably the most famous), flying his helicopter in fraught conditions as he captured cars hurtling through deserts and jungles and everything in between.

Eventually he transitioned to Hollywood, working with directors including Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay. He and Peggy chronicled all this in a 2023 memoir, Flying Sideways, which “reminds us to always follow our destiny and live life at full throttle", the actor Gerard Butler writes in a promotional blurb.

As North found success, he began to spend more leisure time in Hawaii, which he describes as “a foreign country within America”. There’s always “warm water, you always get the splendid beaches, the landscape is just outstanding".

He’d been to Hawaii before — notably for a Calvin Klein commercial — but it was on the set of the dark comedy Tropic Thunder that he was able to really explore.

North says he’s traveled to “over 180 countries". “I’m telling you, Hawaii is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,” he adds. Logically, he continues, he wanted to own a place there.

Expanding the house

The house he bought is on the north shore of Kauai, near the town of Kilauea. When he purchased the property, it spanned about one-and-a-half acres. The second, one-acre lot added frontage to the Waiakalua Reservoir; the other acquisition was an 11-acre lot, which came with a roughly 2,000-square-foot building that could be turned into a caretaker’s building or used for maintenance or “farming pursuits", per the listing’s promotional language. 

North has made sure that the property isn’t overly manicured. “We didn’t want maintenance to be a burden,” he says, so they left the land as a combination of fields, lake and forest. “Nature is right there, embracing you.” 

At the time of his initial purchase, the main house had only two bedrooms. “It was almost as if you had two master suites at the time,” North says. “And we had the vision that we could immediately do so much more with it, because if you’re going to have a vacation house, you need rooms for family and friends.”

They built an addition, with two more bedrooms and two baths. They also built out the attic, which North describes as “a dorm for kids".

In total, the house spans about 3,550 square feet and contains four bedrooms and four-and-a-half baths. (The attic area doesn’t count as a bedroom.)

The house is broken into discrete pavilions. A large entry hall leads to the main kitchen and dining room, which overlooks the pool. Both of the original bedrooms flank the living space and have their own decks. The addition is in back of the house and is reached via a game room. 

“The layout is pretty amazing as far as not bothering each other,” North says. “You can have 12 people in the house without knowing it — each room is pretty far from each other.”

Playing host

The addition was completed by 2017, he says. By that point, the family was spending about four months a year on the island. When Covid-19 hit they moved there for a full, unbroken year.

The family hosted friends from Los Angeles and Europe; they cut trails into the jungle, which they used for ATV races. North would occasionally borrow a friend’s helicopter, landing on the property for a coffee, then “flying off to explore the island".

He would like for whoever buys the property to “have a connection with the home — it won’t just be another house, I’m hoping”, he says. “Because it’s hard for us to let this go.”

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