Jimmy Butler calls the entryway of his Southern California home ‘the beginning of a house’ because, as he puts it, fancy people call it a foyer and he is not that. It is a declaration of tone that runs through every room that follows: a space designed by Tiffany Brooks that Butler happily takes credit for, despite admitting he told her to ‘get freaky with it’ and then stood back while she did. For anyone who has ever wondered how a six-time All-Star actually lives when the cameras are off, seven professional athletes opened their homes to show exactly that, and the results range from a 20,000-bottle wine cellar in Los Angeles to a bowling alley by the beach in California to a wellness room in Cleveland packed with hyperbaric chambers and a dog named Vessy who refuses to leave the wave bed.
Where the wine actually lives
Butler’s wine cellar is the spiritual center of his house. The rotunda at its heart holds roughly 20,000 bottles at capacity, and as of the tour he had 6,100 inside. The collection is organized by region: a California section anchored by Screaming Eagle, a Bordeaux corridor, a Burgundy section that Butler and his sommelier Chris Hoel visit in person every July. Two bottles carry personal weight beyond the others. The first is a custom release tied to Neymar’s number 10, one of only 10 made, and Butler admitted he ‘begged and pleaded’ to get the tenth. The second is labeled Riley Butler after his daughter, born in 2019, part of a 33-bottle collection. His bottle is number 10. ‘It’s all about Neymar if you haven’t noticed,’ Butler said. The whole obsession, he noted, started in 2013 when someone standing next to him at Mark Wahlberg’s film trailer whispered that you do not tell Mark Wahlberg you don’t drink wine, and a bottle of 2010 Sassicaia was opened on the spot.
The coffee operation gets equal square footage in Butler’s thinking. He built a full Big Face Coffee shop inside his home, including a custom espresso machine made in partnership with La Marzocco during a visit to their facility in Italy. He believes it is the only one of its kind in the United States. After basketball, he said, this is what he wants to be doing.
What each athlete made their own
Carmelo Anthony’s New York home reads as a sustained argument that a space should tell you something true about its owner. A Muhammad Ali portrait commands the top of the stairs. A gold shovel used to break ground on the Carmelo Anthony Center in Syracuse sits in the music room. A Nelson Makomao sketch Anthony spotted unfinished in the artist’s South African studio hangs on the wall, acquired before the pencil lines were complete. His dining table surface maps the cities and identities that shaped him: Syracuse, Red Hook, Baltimore, and the flag of Puerto Rico pressed into one surface. He also has a mindfulness room with a flowing waterfall where, he said, the thoughts in your mind are the brush.
In Cleveland, Kevin Love dedicated an entire room to recovery, filling it with a red light therapy panel, a hyperbaric chamber, an infrared sauna, a wave bed, and a Power Plate. His dog Vessy commandeered the wave bed for the duration of the tour.
Maria Sharapova’s beach home near Los Angeles took almost three years to build because the walls are poured concrete, which she came to see as the art itself. She had a custom light commissioned from a British artist named Gareth after tracking him down from a hotel where she spotted his work. The home also contains a professional bowling alley in the basement, a room she freely admitted she had installed despite not being a bowler.
Devin Booker’s desert home in Arizona holds a 1959 Impala convertible he drove on the day of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, a car he found in Utah and considers his entry point into classic car collecting. He calls it Pretty Penny.
JJ Watt and Chelsea Watt gut-renovated a former industrial warehouse in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. The powder room wallpaper replicates a limited-edition Louis Vuitton bag he bought Chelsea a decade earlier, her favorite bag, which she takes on every trip. Their bedroom blackout system is so complete, Watt said, that you have to feel your way to the door in the middle of the night.
Serena Williams designed her home with her sister Venus, whose interior design company V-Star Interiors led the project. A gallery runs from the front door inward and includes a piece by Radcliffe Bailey that contains a rock from the moon. Williams noted that when she wants to feel like going to space, she touches it.
The chair nobody moved
In Genevieve Watt’s purple bedroom, a memory-foam rug sits cut to fit the exact dimensions of the room. When the redesign was discussed, Genevieve issued one condition: the rug stays. John Rogerro, the family’s designer, built everything else around it.
Butler ended his tour at the domino table in the backyard, the same game his father used to teach him to count when he was four years old. He described himself, without irony, as the best domino player in the world, and then walked back inside to feed his kids.
