Diplo, wearing a Brunello Cucinelli shirt, trousers, and shoes, and Jacques Marie Mage glasses, in his library with 1950s French armchairs in a Glant fabric and a speaker sculpture by Lucas Muñoz Muñoz. Fashion Styling by Van Van Alonso.
The DJ reveals his tropical compound, a bold celebration of the landscape and culture of Jamaica.
A side view of the structure suggests a deceptively vertical orientation. “This is a house that asks people to explore and wander. The views unfold as you ascend ever higher,” says Gia Wolff.
Given DIPLO’s PEnchant for genre-bending and -breaking, mixing, and remixing, the property reflects not so much a specific kind of music but Diplo’s approach to music and creativity in general.
With its three dominant notes of concrete, wood, and lush greenery, the house feels like a mash-up of its rainforest setting, the land reconfigured and refined in ways that parallel the sampling and refashioning that are hallmarks of the musician’s practice.
The rhythmic interplay of the artificial and the natural, the different pitches and textures of the various spaces, all offer a glimpse into Diplo’s dexterity as a songwriter and his intuitive grasp of what makes a project work.
The communal dining table was fabricated by Bildad DeLeon of Deleon Wood Works from a slab of Brazilian angelim pedra.
Jamaica has loomed large for Diplo as an artistic lodestar and haven of inspiration since the beginning of his career.
“For a little island, this country has had such a powerful cultural impact around the world. There’s magic here,” the musician insists.
Roughly 10 years ago, he took a leap of faith and purchased 50 acres of land on the northeast side of the island to create an ambitious, off-the-grid retreat for family and friends, far from the madding crowd.
Diplo, in Celine boots and carrying a Hermès bag, astride Rockabye, an 11-year-old American paint horse.
In 2023, he added a neighboring 12-acre plot to the compound. “It was a crazy place to build,” he confesses, citing the myriad challenges of construction, power, and access to the Edenic plot.
“This project was all about patience. There were so many ways that it could have failed, but we kept finding solutions. I thought that, if nothing else, at least I own a bunch of banana trees.”
The recording studio lounge is furnished with Stahl + Band chairs, a Casa Atica sofa, ping-pong, chess tables by Rasttro, and an Objet Vagabond cocktail table.
To tackle the herculean project, Diplo did what he does best—he assembled a team of inspired artists and artisans and set them to the task at hand. in this case, taming the jungle while still preserving its wildly exotic sense of place.
Looking beyond predictable boldface starchitects, he commissioned Lauren Crahan of the Brooklyn-based practice Freecell Architecture, a firm known for its experimental investigations of volumetric relationships and material tectonics. Architectural designer Gia Wolff, a frequent Freecell collaborator who focuses on the performative aspects of architecture and the reciprocal relationship between the user and the environment, was an integral part of the team.
Diplo tapped Sara Nataf, his longtime creative director, to outfit the home, ably abetted by Katelyn Hinden, Diplo’s indefatigable assistant and first lieutenant. “I had these four awesome women controlling my life, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. They get shit done,” he avers.
A sundeck with a wooden brise-soleil traverses both sides of the house while shading the communal dining area. Landscape design by Geoponika.
For her part, Crahan returns the compliment. “Wes,” as she calls Diplo, “was incredibly open to hearing our ideas, what excited us. His whole life is collaborating and fostering artists,” the architect says. Crahan and Wolff began their work by surveying the land with machete-wielding bushmen clearing paths. “The forest was a treasure chest, with hills, lowlands, grottoes, all manner of trees, and a variety of microclimates. A lot of our work was unpacking it and figuring out how to make connections between the landscape elements,” Wolff states.
After determining the precise locations for the main house and subsidiary structures (like the freestanding recording studio pavilion), the design team turned their attention to defining the organization of exterior and interior spaces based on the proportion and character of the individual rooms and volumes.
Handwoven pendant lights by Sara Efia Reddin hang above vintage French Mullca school chairs in the family kitchen.
“Wes has traveled all over the world, and he’s spent a lot of time in tropical places like India and Brazil. We found a nice intersection of interest in the work of people like Geoffrey Bawa, Oscar Niemeyer, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, and Roberto Burle Marx.
Ultimately, we decided that concrete was a natural choice to think about this building. Cast concrete allowed us to make bold, simple volumes that can be in dialogue with the jungle,” Crahan explains.
The pool deck, living room, and primary bedroom are stacked on the north side of the house. The architecture frames and funnels views of the land and the sea.
Loosely divided into a private sphere for Diplo’s use and a side for guest accommodations, the house is centered on a pool and communal dining area. Connective tissues in the form of bridges, trellises, and breezeways weave the structure into a single indoor-outdoor organism, alive to the ever-changing beats and moods of nature.
It is a house designed to celebrate the rites and rituals of everyday life, creating a sense of community through shared conventions and rhythms.
The house is nestled into its hillside site. Rainwater is collected, treated, and stored beneath the pool.
Openness tying its inhabitants simultaneously to the jungle landscape and to one another. “Lauren and Gia were obsessed with light and shadow, and they considered every part of the day. The house changes from morning to noon to sunset, so time enters as an element of the design—the movement of clouds, the rain, the sunshine,” Diplo affirms.
The living room furnishings include a Uniqwa Collections sofa, a vintage Tuareg mat from Atlas Weavers, a vintage French cocktail table of ceramic and oak, and a pair of 1940s armchairs with a Nobilis fabric.
“If you want to know who Diplo is, just look at his house,” says Nataf.
A creative powerhouse whose purview extends to all facets of Diplo’s world, from set design and fashion to brand development and business ventures. She describes the home as a “heavenly stoner palace, where every nook and corner is meant to be a place where you can get inspired and create, or simply chill and contemplate.” The decor is calculated for supreme comfort and ease, with elements that nod to the many countries where Diplo has traveled and the things he loves.
The library, one of the few hermetically sealed rooms on the property, is furnished with a Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams sofa in a Nobilis fabric and a Roger Capron cocktail table. The bar and shelving millwork of Jamaican Guango wood was designed by Freecell and Gia Wolff.
“Everything has meaning, everything has a backstory connected to Wes’s life,” Hinden adds, citing the many obstacles she and Nataf faced in specifying textiles and furnishings able to withstand the extreme jungle climate. On that point, Diplo remains sanguine: “The sun is really hard on the fabrics, but I’m okay with that. It’s part of the rawness of this place. Here, every tree has a personality, a soul, and that’s what you want to embrace.”
A bathroom in a guest suite has a Waterworks mirror and fixtures, a concrete sink, and Allied Maker sconces.
Indeed, the primacy of the environment is underscored by bespoke elements like the tile mural by Sofía Londoño that graces a side of the pool. An homage to the cellular structure of plant life, the mural acts as a bridge between the verdant jungle and the muscular, monochromatic concrete. Londoño’s husband, Carlos Morera, spearheaded the landscape design with his team at Los Angeles–based Geoponika (formerly Cactus Store Gardens). “There are certain places where you can’t simply impose a landscape,” Morera says of his seemingly discreet manipulations and interventions.
A shower in a guest suite is clad in tile by Clé.
“The jungle here has such a defined character that the best you can do is to try to coax it into the life of the house, to make it feel like a natural and inextricable part of the architecture. We analyzed the existing landscape and then tried to re-create some of the all-star moments without looking like anything was forced or alien to the site,” he adds.
The primary bedroom’s custom bed was fabricated by Bildad DeLeon of DeLeon Wood Works. The vintage slate cocktail table is from Obsolete.
Surveying his domain, Diplo feels confident that the years spent cultivating his island refuge were well worth the incredible toil and trouble. “One of the most inspirational things about this place is just hanging out by the banana trees by the pond with the turtles.
A vintage Poul Hundevad chair from Morentz pulls up to a French farm table from Didier Abbeloos in a corner of the primary bedroom.
There are stories and wonders everywhere, not just the house and the interiors,” he muses. “In the middle of the night, you’re surrounded by the soundtrack of Jamaica—a million cicadas and birds and crickets and always dancehall beats drifting in from miles away. It’s what I love about Jamaica, the sounds of the ocean, rivers, animals, buses, and chaos. We’re so high up we only hear it as a kind of soothing ambiance. It feels like my medium.”
Allied Maker pendants hang above the Freecell-designed vanity with fixtures by Watermark Designs in the primary bath.
A view of the skylit home gym.
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A view of the living room cantilevered over the pool. The house design by Freecell Architecture and Gia Wolff orchestrates a pas de deux of light and shadow.
