On a quiet Santa Monica street, a mile from the Pacific Ocean, sits a 7,800-square-foot Spanish-style home, valued at $12.7 million. For the last few years, the sole occupant of this seven-bed, nine-bath house was a twentysomething former professional padel player named Mariano.
Mariano was employed by the renter of the home, an investor we’ll call Jimmy. The Santa Monica pad existed mainly as the ultimate clubhouse, a place where Jimmy and a dozen or so regulars could indulge their obsession with padel. How obsessed? Jimmy spent somewhere in the region of $75,000 to install a professional-grade court at a house he leased for $40,000 a month but never lived in.
