On the basketball court, Miami Heat superstar Jimmy Butler has carved a 14-year career by gliding through space with the melodic flow of an orchestra. When he dribbles, the basketball doesn’t seem to leave his hand so much as become an extension of it. But if anyone believes that professional athletes focus on little more than their capacity to win under pressure, they have not met Butler. While he is undoubtedly an NBA sensation, the six-time All-Star has an expansive personality that rivals his athletic prowess. And Butler’s new home outside San Diego perhaps best exemplifies this fact.
“I grew up with a whole bunch of nothing, so I’ve dreamed of having a home for myself, for my family, and I put everything into this house,” Butler, a native of Tomball, Texas, says. “This is for my kids. I do this to inspire—to show that if you want something you can go get it.”
That fervent mentality, of knowing exactly what he wants and running through walls to achieve it, can be sensed throughout the Spanish Revival residence he purchased in early 2020. When he first joined the NBA, everyone told him he should live in LA during the offseason, but ever prescient, he worried that lifestyle would hurt his young career. “I want space, I want quiet,” says Butler, who is often up before sunrise to get in the first workout. (LA is roughly just a two-hour drive away whenever the bright lights beckon.)
Coming out of high school, Butler was not a highly recruited player. After college, he was the final first-round pick in the 2011 NBA draft (he can list each player selected before him). Butler is living testimony to the belief that “resilience requires happiness,” as he sagely puts it. And happiness, for Butler, has come from expanding his horizons. He lives with both eyes wide open, which has allowed him to discover interests that have changed his life in profound ways. His tally of passions is as long as he is tall (Butler stands a towering six feet seven): coffee, fine wine, international travel, dominoes, tennis, sand volleyball, soccer, and of course, basketball, all of which have dedicated places all over the abode. (Butler, in fact, loves playing dominoes so much that the game—which his father used to teach him to count in childhood—has two allocated spaces on the property.)