The 6,100-square-foot Bel Air home that saw Serena Williams through her career comeback, 23 Grand Slam titles in singles and doubles, and a challenging but steady rise to world dominance is situated on a lot that's decidedly more private than the tennis champion's other properties.
The pale blue residence was built in 1935 and acquired by Serena Williams in 2006 for a little more than $6.6 million. The home was her private retreat on the West Coast for a decade before she listed it at nearly $12 million in October 2017 — one month after the birth of her first child with husband Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit. The home was re-listed earlier this year for closer to $10 million.
Other properties Serena Williams has invested in over the years — her newly acquired home in Beverly Hills and two residences in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida (she purchased one of the Florida properties with her sister, Venus Williams) — are located on smaller lots in tighter neighborhoods.
But the Bel Air home is unique in that it affords perhaps a touch more privacy, resting on a sprawling 2.7 acres set off a quiet residential road that rambles up into the foothills, with more space between neighbors and lots of vegetation to obscure views. The home itself is hidden behind high hedges and other landscaping, and the entire area boasts mature trees, as one would expect in and around Stone Canyon.
On one of the largest lots in the canyon area, the home includes 6 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms in addition to a statement-making semicircular living room with floor-to-ceiling windows, private balconies off some of the bedrooms, a spacious master bath with a claw-foot soaking tub, private salon and very stately grounds.
One can't help but imagine the rest and relaxation that the home may have offered over a decade's worth of Serena Williams' career struggles, controversies, fashion statements, endorsements and victories.
Around the same time Serena Williams put the Bel Air home on the market, she and Ohanian purchased a Spanish-style contemporary home with 5 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms on a quarter acre in Beverly Hills for $6.7 million. A stone's throw from Mulholland Drive and Coldwater Canyon Park, the new manse is actually more removed from the bustle of Los Angeles, situated further up into the hills. But the smaller parcels and more tightly arranged neighborhood don't proffer the same room to breathe, so to speak, that the Bel Air home did.
No doubt the busy tennis ace's life will still involve world travel and solo and family time in Florida as well as Paris — Williams is fluent in French and has long kept an apartment there — and other far-flung destinations. But when she's in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills will now be home.
Now that she's bidding the Bel Air property adieu, perhaps her recent acquisition of the Beverly Hills property — which may put her in more regular contact with her neighbors — is a sign that Williams, along with Ohanian, sought a residence with a touch more of a community atmosphere to it than her previous homes.
And there's no doubt that for this tennis ace, who's already proven herself to be more than capable in terms of her career, marriage and motherhood, being a star neighbor as well will surely be as easy as game, set, match.
The Bel Air home, located at 1201 Stone Canyon Road, is listed with Greg Piechota with Kase Real Estate.
Photo courtesy of Kase Real Estate
