Stephen Curry Quietly Buys $31 Million Atherton Mansion
The Bay Area bedroom community of Atherton, Calif. already boasts the wealthiest zip code in all the United States, but an investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle determined it’s still rapidly getting wealthier. Silicon Valley tech billionaires and foreign business barons — the majority of them from Mainland China — have punted local home values into the stratosphere; the average sale price for the first half of 2019 rang in at a blood-curdling $8.1 million.
Back in June, a brand-new Atherton estate quietly sold for exactly $31 million, an amount that ranks as the most paid for a house in 2019 — not just in Atherton, but in the entirety of the Bay Area. Because the property was never listed on the open market, however, pictures and details of the record-holding house are slim to nonexistent, save for a handful of renderings that reveal how the mansion’s exterior looks today — approximately.
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Though the property was technically acquired by a mysteriously-named entity, a deep dive into records confirms the $31 million buyer is not a tech bajillionaire or foreign investor but rather professional basketball’s own Stephen Curry — a man currently signed to a whopping $201 million contract with the NBA’s Golden State Warriors — and his wife Ayesha.
Though Curry’s enormous residential splurge doesn’t appear to have been previously reported in the press, news of his purchase will not shock the residents and realtors of Atherton, who’ve apparently known for months they have an NBA superstar living among them. And since Atherton remains a small, relatively close-knit town, the local gossip grapevine has correspondingly already run amok with news of the Currys’ splashy arrival.
Sited at the very end of a little-known cul-de-sac, on a 1.2-acre lot that is irregularly shaped but desirably flat and supremely private, the gated house is barely visible from the street. Built in 2019 on speculation by prominent Atherton developer Joe Comartin, the new structure has three full levels and features a deft blend of traditional and contemporary styles, a popular look in the neighborhood.
Records show that Comartin and his wife Natalie paid about $6.5 million for the property way back in 2007. It appears they may have lived in the existing house — a vaguely Craftsman-style 1913 mansion — for about a decade before razing the beast and replacing it with an all-new structure that was built by Comartin’s Woodlane Properties in collaboration with Arcanum Architecture and sustainable landscape design by Studio Green.
Renderings for the estate show a long gated driveway with off-street parking for at least a half-dozen vehicles. The drive moseys right past the imposing home’s front entryway and ends at a detached three-car garage with accessory living space in a loft above the vehicles.
The glassy, multi-winged house is surrounded on all sides by lush plantings and native flora, courtesy of the eco-friendly sustainability experts at Studio Green. Out back, an extra-large swimming pool is surrounded by a generous patio and a poolside cabana with fireplace and built-in BBQ. Extensive lawns, formal gardens and generous terraces abound, and the property additionally features a small guesthouse tucked into a far rear corner of the lot.
Despite the lack of interior photos, it’s a good bet the Curry house shares more than a passing resemblance to this Atherton megamansion, located just a couple short blocks away. That house, which was also developed on speculation by Comartin in collaboration with Arcanum and Studio Green, sold back in 2015 — after just three weeks on the market — for $35.3 million in cash to a woman named Yasmin Lukatz, in one of Atherton’s biggest-ever deals. (Lukatz, a Stanford MBA holder who runs a Silicon Valley-based non-profit focused on supporting Israeli startups, happens to be the stepdaughter of multibillionaire casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson.)
Curry has been a busy real estate bee over the past year — back in January, he sold a $6.3 million Alamo, Calif. mansion at a slight profit; that same month, he also unloaded his North Carolina starter home at a slight loss. The 31-year-old’s Atherton residential splurge will run him approximately $330,000 in annual property taxes alone, several times the amount of his current residence, another $6 million Alamo mansion that was purchased only last year. Not that the high-paid Warrior can’t afford it, of course.
And Curry can also take comfort in knowing his new Atherton neighbors are every bit as rich as he. Besides Lukatz, some of the other nearest folks include Warriors owner Joe Lacob and WhatsApp billionaire Jan Koum, whose $80+ million, still-under-construction mega-estate is just two doors away. And practically next door to Curry is another substantial estate that serves as the main residence for high-profile real estate developer Dave Dollinger and his new wife Tara, the couple who recently purchased a $29 million teardown in Bel Air.
Directly behind the Curry estate is an even larger compound that — back in 2017 — sold for $33.5 million to billionaire Liu Qiangdong, the so-called “Jeff Bezos of China.” Next door to Liu is the $25 million compound of Chinese real estate billionaire Liu Zhiqiang, and next door to him is the even larger complex of KKR’s multibillionaire leader George Roberts. On and on it goes — Atherton’s residents list includes a nearly countless number of tech tycoons and foreign business moguls.
Launch Gallery: Stephen Curry Scores $31 Million Atherton Mansion
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