It’s not uncommon for NBA players’ homes to have luxe amenities such as spacious gyms, full basketball courts, and enviable saunas. On top of everything, their residences are rarely lacking in overall style. Perhaps because they spend much of the year on the road, their homes need to feel truly personal and aesthetically their own. And considering the fact that many basketball players end up moving when they sign onto a new team or are traded, (for instance, D’Angelo Russell, who grew up in Kentucky but has lived in Minnesota since signing with the Minnesota Timberwolves), the need for a proper refuge is only further heightened.
Below we’ve selected six NBA players’ homes that are as impressive as the athletes themselves—and yes, Russell’s Minnesota spot does indeed make an appearance.
An Arizona abode for Devin Booker
Within the hard boundaries of a basketball court, NBA wunderkind Devin Booker has crafted a style with all the finesse of a butterfly. The 25-year-old Phoenix Suns guard has a fluidity, an impossibly fast series of movements, that would have made Sergei Diaghilev proud. When he shoots, the basketball seems to cooperate—as balls seem to do for all great players—before the parabola is completed through the basket (in 2018, Booker was crowned the NBA Three-Point Contest champion). But even though the public is used to seeing him gliding across a basketball court, Booker’s domestic digs perhaps demonstrate an even keener grasp of physical detail and the movement of bodies in space.
“I consider myself fortunate to be surrounded by people with great style,” Booker says. “Whenever I walk into my friends’ homes, I’m like a sponge, asking questions and absorbing what I see.” That curiosity is now on full display in the basketball star’s sleek Arizona abode. The modern single-story home features dramatic views of the nearby Phoenix Mountains Preserve, as if the framed vistas were painted by the Taos Society of Artists. In fact, it was precisely that drama, that immediate connection to the surrounding landscape, that attracted Booker in the first place. “When someone approaches the house, it’s deceiving because it appears there’s not much going on,” Booker explains of the property, which was sold to him in 2019 by his brother, Davon Wade, a real estate agent. “But once people enter and they see the pool, the yard, and all the adjoining rooms, they’re taken aback. I love how a seemingly straightforward home can still be a big reveal.”
Booker is widely considered among the NBA’s brightest young stars, but his origins tell a humbler story. “When I was a kid growing up in Michigan, I’d close my eyes before bed and imagine what my house might one day look like,” the Grand Rapids native says. “The size or shape of the home would be different depending on the night, but the interiors were always the same: modern with a bit of nostalgia in the mix.” Booker doesn’t have to close his eyes anymore. With a helping hand from LA–based AD100 firm Clements Design, that dream is now a reality. —Nick Mafi
D’Angelo Russell’s Minnesota manse
When NBA star D’Angelo Russell decided to renovate his rustic home outside of Minneapolis, he insisted on employing a very limited color palette. “He wanted everything in black and white,” says interior designer Tiffany Thompson, the founder and principal designer at Duett Interiors in Portland. She oversaw the redesign of the all-star’s two-level, 6,300-square-foot residence. “He was really into the contrasts that those two colors invite so we figured out a way to make that work.”
Thompson installed a black, Italian leather sectional sofa in the living room alongside a cream colored Flag Halyard chair with Icelandic sheepskin designed by Hans Wegner. A dark, Belvedere leathered quartzite countertop in the kitchen is surrounded by black leather and brass chairs. Cherry wood flooring runs throughout the home.
Combining the property’s rustic, midwestern roots with a calm, seductive feel was the goal, Thompson says. She found inspiration for the color palette through a visit to Yakushima, an island in Japan that is deeply wooded and dense. “A Japanese inspiration and philosophy of openness and exploration,” she calls it. The result is an aesthetic that skillfully balances a variety of textures, including injecting Shou Sugi Ban custom treatments inspired by Japanese principles of wabi-sabi that typically employ elements of asymmetry, roughness, and simplicity. The “mood board,” as Thompson describes the interior scheme, is meant to accentuate the very nature of fall, generating a distinctive emotional response to the seasonal shift.
“I loved working with Tiffany on this project,” says Russell, a Louisville, Kentucky, native who joined the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2020. “This is our second project together, so we have a really good dynamic. She understands my taste and what I wanted and takes chances with the design choices,” he says. —Troy J. McMullen
Kevin Love’s New York dream pad
“When I was 18 years old, I had written down in a notebook that I wanted to own an apartment and live in New York by the time I was 30,” says Kevin Love, the star forward for the Cleveland Cavaliers. “And yeah, I closed on and received the key to this apartment three months before my 30th birthday.” And yeah, Love’s stellar Tribeca off-season home can also be added to a roster of other checklist accomplishments: He is also a five-time All-Star player, an NBA championship winner, and a 2012 Olympics gold medalist.
And though New York City was always in his sights, Love took a long time before he found just the right place. Last spring, he moved into a majestic three-bedroom downtown apartment, in a brand-new waterfront construction. “I come from the Pacific Northwest, where we have all the elements,” he explains. “And I was drawn to this place. One of the last undeveloped Tribeca waterfront properties, it was a place where I knew I would be able to just look out the window and see the West Side Highway, the trees, the water, the cityscape across the river. I love being grounded, having that sight line with all the elements.”
Love reached out to Kerry Varnum of Grey Designs to help customize the space and pretty much furnish “from scratch.” (The two had worked together on Love’s Cleveland home.) “Kevin had pulled a lot of images,” Varnum says of her client’s clear aesthetic direction. “Very New York, very industrial.” Love says, “I really wanted a mix of classic Tribeca and the American West. You’ll see some Navajo prints, and you’ll see the cowboy in the art. I like that mystery, added in with the urban grit.” —Ariel Foxman
Magic Johnson’s Pacific Coast home
It’s a sunny Labor Day weekend in Southern California, and the daily agenda of Earvin “Magic” Johnson looks something like this. Friday: Lunch at beach club with Cookie and kids. Saturday: NCAA football season openers on outdoor TV. Sunday: Brunch with Cookie at the resort.
The Hall of Famer, and former point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers, knows what it means to chill. Which is not to suggest that the man doesn’t keep busy. But when weekends and holidays roll around, he, his wife, Cookie, and their children, EJ and Elisa, close up the house in Beverly Hills and head south to their house at the beach, a three-story and Tuscan-style villa perched high on a cliff above the aquamarine Pacific.
Fresh from morning workouts, relaxing in their airy kitchen overlooking the ocean, the Johnsons describe how their coastal retreat came to be. “We used to own a second home in Napili, Hawaii, but we just said, ‘Man, it’s too far to get to,’” Magic Johnson says. “Cookie and I always used to come south for little getaways. So we were down for our anniversary in September a couple of years ago, staying at a hotel at the time, and we had his-and-her massages. That was the moment right there. She turned and looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t we just get a home here?’”
So resolved, they quickly found a property that met all their major criteria: steps from the sand, Mediterranean architecture, good indoor-outdoor flow. Eager to bring a laid-back, beach-y vibe to its 17 rooms, the couple began interviewing interior designers. “Then we were driving around LA one Saturday, and I said, ‘There’s Kreiss; let’s see what they can do for us,’” recalls Johnson, referring to one of the far-flung furniture outlets run by the Kreiss family. Michael Kreiss, the firm’s president, had overseen the decoration of the Johnsons’s house in town 19 years earlier. “I tell you what, it was amazing. I’m going to have to admit something. When they came in with all these swatches and things—I don’t know what a swatch should look like for a sofa and this and that. So I had to just back up and say, ‘Cookie, all I want is a movie theater.’ But she and the Kreisses did a wonderful job.” —Peter Haldeman
A Brooklyn family home for JJ Redick
“We were never supposed to live here,” says Chelsea Redick, sinking into a curved sofa covered in a creamy Pierre Frey linen in the Dumbo duplex she and her husband JJ—All-Star NBA veteran, new New Orleans Pelican, and sometimes podcast host—share with their sons, Knox, 5, and Kai, 3. Since the couple met during JJ’s rookie year with the Orlando Magic in 2006, they have resided in a whopping 14 residences across six cities. Think of it as a high-stakes game of musical chairs where you follow the basketball to the best contract.
So in 2015 when the Redicks initially started apartment hunting in New York City, they were just looking for a pied-à-terre—somewhere to put their feet up in the off-season. JJ was playing for the Los Angeles Clippers at the time, with no idea where he’d land next. They had recently welcomed their first child and wanted to be closer to their families on the East Coast. During a series of trips to New York for away games and the All-Star weekend, they pounded the pavement touring properties across downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. “For whatever reason, we liked Dumbo,” says JJ, perched on a midcentury Marco Zanuso chair, his casual jeans and T-shirt revealing a tattoo sleeve that’s in refreshing contrast to his elegant surroundings. “We liked the grittiness of it and the warehouse backstory.” They put a deposit down on a penthouse apartment in a 1913 factory building with train tracks running through the lobby. It was still in the process of being converted to residential, so they leapt in sight unseen.
A year and a half passed, they had a second child, and the apartment still wasn’t ready. Meanwhile, Chelsea’s twin sister and her husband were now living in Dumbo with a baby on the way. Chelsea wanted to be closer to them. The Redicks decided to rent a place in the neighborhood, they enrolled their eldest in preschool, and she started settling in while JJ finished out the season in LA.
Their penthouse apartment was still a construction zone, but Chelsea would stop by the concierge desk to collect packages. Pretty soon, she had charmed one of the doormen into sneaking her up to their unit. (She and JJ had still never laid eyes on it.) In something straight out of a detective playbook, they tiptoed in after 11 p.m., their iPhone flashlights guiding the way. “The second I walked in, I was like, ‘It’s too small for us,’” she recalls. “Then I made him sneak me into this one.” Not only was it more spacious, it boasted an epic 2,600-square-foot terrace. “I did one lap, phoned JJ, and said, ‘We need to call tomorrow and swap it.’”
Their pied-à-terre was starting to look more like a full-time residence. Which meant the stock finishes it came with might need some rethinking too. The couple called on decorator Michael Aiduss, whom they had been introduced to through their brother-in-law, to drive the process. “One of the first things Chelsea told me was, ‘I would love to live in a European apartment,’” the designer relays from his office in Montclair, New Jersey. A fair enough request, except for the fact that their industrial Brooklyn loft couldn’t have been further from a Parisian maisonette, geographically or philosophically. “It was a very careful editing process of crafting the spaces to make them seem more formal in their architectural organization, while understanding that there are two large walls of glass windows that wouldn’t have existed in a classical apartment,” he continues. —Jane Keltner de Valle
Amar’e Stoudemire’s South Florida spot
When professional basketball player and six-time All-Star Amar’e Stoudemire and his wife, Alexis, began to search for a new house in South Florida, it wasn’t style or even exact location that was their top priority. It was more about size, which is not surprising for a man who at six-foot-ten dwarfs most people, furniture, and, most importantly, spaces.
“We just wanted a nice family-style home with no stairs,” Alexis says, “basically a sanctuary for us to get away from everything.” They found that in a 12,000-square-foot house in Southwest Ranches, 15 miles outside of Ft. Lauderdale. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a neighbor. But what appealed most to Amar’e: the sky-high ten-foot doorways, expansive wall spaces, and palatial and ultra-high ceilings.
Another important attribute: efficiency. They didn’t want to renovate, but rather move themselves and their four kids in quickly. From what was available, they decided upon their favorite turnkey option. Still, there was work to be done to turn the house into a home. With a referral from Kobe Bryant’s wife, Vanessa, they found the perfect person for the job: Lori Halprin, who is accustomed to working with athletes who want near-instant gratification despite needing to order almost all custom furniture because of their typically extra-large sizes. “I understand their lifestyle and know what they’re looking for,” says Halprin, the proprietor of Envision Fine Furnishings, who makes all her furniture custom in Los Angeles. “Often it’s the first time they’ve fit in a bed they didn’t dangle off, or sit in a sofa that actually accommodated their tall frame. I know how to make it comfortable for the rest of the family too.” —Kathryn Romeyn
