Your Inn
High ceilings and beautifully appointed rooms take you back to an idyllic era, when royalty and famous visitors called.
Hilo 's Shipman House Bed and Breakfast Inn offers you the rare opportunity to indulge in the lifestyle of Hawaii's monarchy era, with the grand victorian homes, extensive grounds, and furnishings of the finest native Hawaiian woods. Purchased, restored and preserved by a Shipman descendent, this is one of the state's last privately-owned Victorian mansions. It is on both the State and National Registers. We have self-guided tours of the house available to our guests, and you are welcome in most of the home and grounds.
Do you play the piano? If so, you may tickle the ivories of our 1912 Steinway Parlour Grand B, as did Hawaii's last monarch, Queen Lili`uokalani, whose book of compositions lies nearby. The piano is always in tune.
We grow our own fruit. Today there are over 20 varieties of tropical fruit trees on the property, numerous varieties of bananas, white pineapples, avocados, taro, and even a small coffee plantation. Fruits in season appear on the breakfast buffet, and exotic flowers from the garden grace the house and guest rooms. Ask about a Garden Tour.
In 1993, the Shipmans' great-granddaughter and her husband, Barbara Ann and Gary Andersen, returned from the San Francisco Bay Area to purchase and restore the family home on Reed's Island in Hilo, on the big Island of Hawai`i. They continue the family tradition of Hawaiian hospitality as they open their historic home and guesthouse to bed and breakfast guests.
Let us share memories and family anecdotes with you over breakfast. Barbara and her sister spent a part of every summer with their great-aunts at the house, climbing trees, weeding the cutting garden, riding wheelbarrows down rolling green lawns, arranging flowers, making plum jam, bathing in claw-foot tubs, and sleeping in four-poster beds.
Barbara and Gary love this side of the island, and enthusiastically share its beauty, history, special nooks and crannies with their guests. This part of Hawai`i, slow, lush and green, so often overlooked by travelers and travel agents, has that "old Hawai`i" charm which most visitors really enjoy.
Visit Hilo and be charmed. Stay at Shipman to make it really special!
