Featured business
Nona Lani Cottages — oceanfront in Kihei since 1971.
Family-owned oceanfront cottages in Kihei, on Maui’s south shore. The other kind of Maui stay: a cottage rather than a floor of a resort tower, on the opposite side of the island from this beach.
Disclosure
Nona Lani Cottages is a paid placement on this guide. They pay to be featured here. We say so on this page and on the featured businesses page, and we do not write claims about a business that we have not verified with them first — so this page tells you who they are and who they are for, and sends you to their own site for the details.
A cottage, not a tower
Nona Lani Cottages has been family-owned and operated in Kihei since 1971 — which is worth pausing on. The Sheraton Maui, up at Puʻu Kekaʻa on Hawaii’s first planned resort, had opened in 1963; Nona Lani was taking guests eight years later and is still in the same family. Fifty-plus years of that is not a marketing line, it is just unusual.
The reason to mention it on a Kaanapali guide is that plenty of people planning a Maui trip assume the choice is between resorts. It is not. The alternative is a small, low-rise, oceanfront place with its own front door, which is a fundamentally different holiday from the fourteenth floor of anything.
The south shore is a different island
Kihei is on Maui’s south shore, roughly 35 miles from Kaanapali — far enough that it is a base, not a day trip from here. It is a genuinely different feel from West Maui: less resort strip, more town, and a run of county beach parks along the coast.
The two lifeguarded stretches on Maui’s south side are Kamaole I, II and III at Kihei and Makena State Park a little further down — which is more lifeguarded beach than West Maui has, where only Hanakaoʻo at the south end of Kaanapali and D.T. Fleming up at Kapalua are staffed. If you are travelling with children who swim, that is a real difference between the two coasts and almost nobody mentions it.
Splitting a trip between the two sides is a common and sensible plan: a few nights on the south shore and a few up here for Black Rock and the Kaanapali beach itself. Thirty-five miles on Maui is not nothing, but it is one drive, once.
Rates, cottages and availability
Theirs to publish, not ours to approximate. What we can tell you is what is verified: family-owned, oceanfront, in Kihei, since 1971.
Their own site is the place for what they offer and what it costs: nonalanicottages.com. Back to the businesses featured on this guide, or to the Kaanapali Beach guide itself.