A man’s home is his castle, the saying goes, but at some point, even a legendary troubadour bids farewell to the 7,925-square-foot castle he called home. So goes George Strait, as his San Antonio mansion is now on the market.
And what a castle it is. All Strait’s exes live in Texas, and there’s space for all of them at the place he kept in San Antonio’s ritzy Dominion neighborhood (where Strait’s neighbors have included Stone Cold Steve Austin, Tommy Lee Jones, and most Spurs you can name). There’s the infinity pool and spa, of course, the gourmet indoor kitchen, the home gym and sauna, the (rather modest in number, if not in individual scope) three bedrooms, the combination basketball/tennis court, the walk-in “safe room,” the rustic outdoor kitchen, and fourteen hand-sculpted masonry fireplaces to keep the King of Country warm at night.
At “Santa Fe In The Dominion,” as the property is listed, it’s really the aesthetics that make the property so notable. The shocking number of fireplaces aside, the property lacks many of the extravagancies of, say, the home Deion Sanders once owned in Prosper, with its personal bowling alley and movie theater adorned with red velvet walls.
Walking up to the front door of Strait’s place, prospective buyers can stride along mosaic tiled walkways to the similarly-styled driveway, through a squat adobe archway and past the (non-native) cacti. That heavy wooden door, framed by modest stone pillars and wrought-iron sconces, leads inside, where the rustic theme continues.
The interior of the house is all heavily styled. The shutters on the windows come from saguaro cactus ribs, which appears to be used on the ceilings, too. The adobe-styled staircases have a loose, hand-finished quality, and the wood—from the floors to the doors to the bathroom cabinets—has a rustic, hand-stained appeal. The entire thing looks like something Chip and Joanna Gaines would come up with if they were given free rein to design a place with the only creative brief being “rustic and authentic, but no shiplap.”
Which is nice, actually. It makes perfect sense that Deion Sanders’s place would have a blacklight bowling alley in it—the dude’s nickname is “Neon.” That’d be tacky as heck in George Strait’s house, where tasteful authenticity is essentially the man’s brand (a possibly-apocryphal story goes that he once showed up for a photo shoot with Annie Liebovitz in the ’80s, instructed to bring a variety of outfits, with four different pressed white shirts and pairs of starched Wranglers). The ornate details tend more towards custom metalwork on the stainless steel doors of the King of Country’s refrigerator, or the occasional stained-glass window over a stairway. The larger rooms have unfinished exposed wood ceiling beams, and some of the fireplaces are decorated with hand-painted recreations of Native American artwork.
Out back, the deal is the same: Saltillo tile surrounds the hot tub and infinity-edge pool. The wrought-iron ledge on the balcony reassuringly places a barrier between you and the view of the Texas hill country. It’s easy enough to imagine the man himself sitting out there, overlooking the vista on a dusk night as he strums “The Chill of an Early Fall” before retreating inside to one of his very many fireplaces. The Santa Fe styling is in place in the one-bedroom, one-bath back guest house, with clay and turquoise-colored tile in the kitchenette and bathroom.
While the listing is active, there’s no asking price on the house yet. Tax records indicate that the place is estimated to be worth just a shade under $4 million, which means that the asking price should be a fair bit north of that. That’s a heck of a lot of money, but it’s a better deal than taking Strait up on his offer for oceanfront property in Arizona.
