"With its five-story living room, 200 tons of stonework, soaring redwood beams and five-foot-thick, 14-foot-high, 2,000-pound front door, the triangular temple is still spectacular. Which is not to say that the former playboy's paradise has been turned into anything resembling a traditional home."
"Many of what Chamberlain once called his home's 'kinky details' are gone, among them a mirrored ceiling in the master bedroom that retracted to reveal open sky and a Cleopatra-inspired sunken bathtub that sat at the foot of the bed."
"Still, like Meyer and Semple before him, Novikov seems imbued with a caretaker's sense of responsibility to honor the legacy of the prodigious scorer who built the place in the early 1970s."
Wilt Chamberlain's Bel-Air hilltop estate, built in the early 1970s, remains architecturally spectacular despite changing ownership twice since his death a decade ago. The current owner, Russian investor Dmitri Novikov, purchased the property for $6.55 million and is conducting extensive renovations. While many of Chamberlain's extravagant original features—including a retractable mirrored ceiling, sunken bathtub, and water bed floor—have been removed or modified, the home's distinctive architectural elements persist. The moat pool has been reconfigured into three smaller pools with a lap pool. Successive owners have demonstrated caretaker responsibility toward preserving Chamberlain's legacy, maintaining certain original details like provocative artwork in guest bathrooms.
Read at Los Angeles Times
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