Few sports stars buy and sell multimillion-dollar homes with the head-spinning alacrity of professional basketball superstar Chris Paul. And, as one of the highest paid athletes on the planet who, as of November 2020, now dribbles and shoots for the Phoenix Suns with an annual pay check well in excess of $40 million per year, he can more than afford to buy just about whatever he wants. Indeed, in just the last few years alone he’s bought and/or sold at least five large and lavish homes in California and Texas.
Over the summer of 2019, around the time the former L.A. Clipper was traded from the Houston Rockets, where he played a single season, to the Oklahoma City Thunder, the 10-time All-Star player and his college sweetheart wife Jada put their 17-room contemporary villa in Houston’s wealthy Bayou Woods neighborhood on the market at $8.3 million. The price plunged to $7.2 million before it was sold, as was first revealed by the property gossips at the L.A. Times, late last year for an undisclosed amount. The Pauls acquired the contemporary residence in April 2018. The sale price for the transaction is also undisclosed but it was last listed at $6.9 million, so it seems unlikely he earned much if any profit from his brief residency.
With five en suite bedrooms and six full and three half bathrooms in just over 10,000 square feet over three floors, the striking Lauren Rottet-designed residence is a boxy, H-shaped confection of stone, glass and smooth, putty-colored stucco with accents of golden Texas limestone. Fortified like Fort Knox, there’s a double-gated driveway as well as a walled and gated courtyard entrance planted with olive trees.
Understated and comfortably sumptuous, the huge home is well equipped for a top-notch pro athlete, a tech tycoon or, this being Texas, a fracking baron. Clay roof tiles were imported from France, reclaimed 200-year-old oak beams enhance the ceilings and a 6,500-gallon rainwater collection system helps defray water consumption. There’s even a climate-controlled three-car garage so the pampered homeowner need never endure the indignity of a hot (or cold) car.
Inside there are rich dark-brown hardwood floors and floor-to-ceiling steel-trimmed windows that flood the house with natural light. A freestanding double-sided fireplace clad in Texas limestone and accented with black marble separates the formal living room from the formal dining room where wood and glass cabinets hold and display dozens of bottles of wine. A cozily proportioned and fully paneled library/den spill out to a quiet patio, while the premium-grade chef’s kitchen is open to an informal dining room and a family room with an asymmetrical minimalist fireplace that’s crafted from boldly veined black marble and more of that delicious Texas limestone.
Each of the guest bedrooms is ample and sumptuously appointed with a lavish private bath but it is the mansion’s primary suite on the second floor where the luxuriousness really gets dialed up. An antique stone fireplace warms the sitting area of the bedroom that flows out to a private balcony, while the bathroom is large enough to float a deep soaking tub in the center of the room. Two by-any-standard enormous walk-in closets are fitted like a luxury boutique with miles of lighted shelves and a built-in island dresser. A separate wing contains a state-of-the-art media lounge with wet bar and a separate room for playing poker and doing puzzles.
Beside the limestone-edged swimming pool and spa, an open-air cabana has a fireplace set into a handset stone wall. A wooden panel over the fireplace opens to reveal a hidden television and chevron-pattern wood doors on either side of the fireplace house a built-in grill and storage space. Beyond the pool, a flat sweep of lawn is bordered by a verdant and attractively un-manicured walls of mature trees and foliage that ensure privacy from the neighboring mansions.
The property was listed with Dee Dee Guggenheim Howes of Compass. The buyers were represented by Maureen Boyd.
The property mad six-foot-tall point guard previously owned a giant mansion of more than 18,000 square feet in The Woodlands, a planned community in the northern exurbs about 40 miles outside of downtown Houston, that he picked up in late 2017 for $6.362 million and sold at a loss only about 18 months later for $5.85 million.
Back on the West Coast, where Paul spent about six years with the Clippers (2011-2017), he once owned a 12,000-square-foot mansion in a guard-gated Bel Air enclave that he bought in 2012 from Avil Lavigne for almost $8.5 million and sold in the fall of 2017 for $8.7 million. His also owned a much smaller house in Woodland Hills that was sold in early 2018 for $1.95 million, and he briefly owned a 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean sprawler in Calabasas that he bought in late 2015 for almost $9 million and profitably sold in 2018 for $11.05 million.
More recently, as in not even a year ago, he dropped a mite more than $11.1 million in an off-market deal for a brand-new mansion in L.A.’s Encino community. So, while he may be playing in Phoenix and pulled up sticks in Texas, he still has a solid foothold in southern California.