Grindr’s Joel Simkhai Taps Out of Mansion in the Hills

Mark David
·2 min read

Having bought another, more expensive and slightly larger house earlier this year, geosocial dating app entrepreneur Joel Simkhai, founder of the gay hookup app Grindr and the more broadly aimed (and less prurient) Blendr, has put a neo-Mediterranean mansion in L.A.’s star-favored Outpost Estates neighborhood on the market at a touch less than $10 million. Sadly for Simkhai, the asking price is half a million dollars below the $10.5 million he paid for the nearly 8,400-square-foot city-view mansion not quite three years ago. Happily, however, he can more than afford the hefty loss, having sold Grindr in 2018 to Chinese gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech for almost $250 million. The property is jointly represented by Jory Burton and Heather Shorr at Sotheby’s Intl. Realty.

The freshly rehabbed, multilevel neo-Spanish sprawler, built in the late 1980s on more than one-third of an acre with six bedrooms and five bathrooms, plus three powder rooms, four fireplaces and a two-story entrance hall, effortlessly fuses a variety of vintage details with a decidedly clean-lined contemporary aesthetic.

Enhanced by a chunky wood-beamed ceiling and a simple but imposing whitewashed fireplace, the living room spills out to the backyard through full-height steel-trimmed French doors. The grand-scale dining room adjoins a wine lounge with bespoke display cabinets while the spacious eat-in kitchen opens to a family room that looks out over the swimming pool and across a glittering carpet of lights.

Simkhai’s glassy new Sunset Strip digs measure in at almost 8,800 square feet with five bedrooms and nine bathrooms. Originally listed with a pie-in-the-sky price of $22.5 million, the entrepreneur picked it up for a hugely reduced, if still forbidding, $13 million.

Launch Gallery: A Look Around Joel Simkhai's Former Hollywood Hills Mansion

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