As LaMelo Ball gets settled in with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a clip of what appears to be his Charlotte residence has been circulating, due to the interior design choices therein. When I asked the user who circulated the video where he got it from, he said he found it on TikTok, where it was posted by a mover on the job, who appears to have deleted his original post. To the best of our knowledge, this is indeed LaMelo Ball's Charlotte home, or anyway the home of someone in possession of LaMelo Ball's NBA awards and Slam magazine cover. I suppose the even weirder possibility is that someone else lived there.

This place is best experienced with fresh eyes, without any preparation, so watch the video below, and then we can review. OK: It's a Trolli gummy bag zoned for residential use. It's the online lobby for a vape-era Saints Row reboot. If you're on a $203.8 million contract, you get to move into the weed bodega that imports "exotic" Lays flavors. It has neon light fixtures everywhere, Pop-A-Shot, aliens sporting jewelry and shooting sleeves, and mural caricatures of LaMelo himself in various styles. There's an inclusive bathroom sign featuring a yeti. There's a stack of $100 bills behind a pane of glass that reads, in part: "This is for emergencies—not pizza cravings."

To better understand the contents of this home, I enlisted Sami Reiss, who writes eloquently about furniture and design at his SNAKE newsletter as well as many other outlets. This was only a 30-second viral clip, but it gave us a lot to talk about: how one particular furnishing was the tip of a greater iceberg of perversity, how athletes approach decor in general, and what design philosophies LaMelo might get into in the future. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

As soon as I saw this video, I realized I wouldn't have the necessary vocabulary to take in what's going on here, and that's why I'm calling you up.

Awesome.

There's so much here, but to narrow it down, what is your favorite room or favorite piece, to use that word somewhat euphemistically?

Oh yeah, I'm looking at the place again. Part of me likes the sparkle kitchen island, because it's an example of how far he went with it. You see [one room] and you're like, maybe this is the—I don't know—man cave. It reminded me almost of the kid's room in Uncut Gems. It's like a perverse kind of cartoon. People were saying it looked like Dave & Buster's, but to me it looked—I don't want to say worse than that, but it was worse than that.

The fact that he had the galaxy sparkle on the kitchen island implied that—who knows what his bedroom looks like, the rest of the apartment, the garage. That was the little baby hint that there's a lot more going on here than we see in this 30-second clip, which is overwhelming. It's like being at a Pink Floyd laser show.

That was my next question. The dissonance of the kitchen is crazy because you have the preexisting wood and steel that was probably there before he moved in, the cabinetry and kitchen stuff, and then bam—you just got the space nebula countertop in the center of that. It's incredible.

It brings to mind a couple things. It makes me think of how old I am. They had the Foamposites, the shoes that came out in the late '90s, and they came out with the Galaxy Foams like 14, 15 years ago, and they've become this almost generationally important shoe. For someone like LaMelo, how old is he? [We double-check his age] 24. He was born like two weeks before 9/11. It's almost like a pair of original Jordans to you or me. But the fact that the cabinets weren't touched, and that he has the standard cabinet-mounted oven and range means that ... was he halfway into overhauling the whole kitchen? Is it that there aren't consumer options to do this? Is it that he put down the Galaxy Foamposite kitchen counter, and decided, Oh, this isn't for me? There's a grand tradition of design coverage which just bags on people for doing anything whatsoever idiosyncratic with their apartment or house, but I almost don't have an opinion. Like, this kid's 24.

When did he move to Charlotte?

Six years ago.

So yeah, you have to wonder. Hey, God bless, he's doing something. I don't know if I could have it, but also, does he have kids?

Yeah, he had his first child in January.

Oh, OK. I was gonna say this is a kitchen that a kid would like, but I guess his kid's very young, so who knows? It's almost all speculation, but it is jaw-dropping. I've never seen a kitchen island like that ... legitimately I don't even know what he does in that room. It's very overwhelming.

Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine him marinating some meat and throwing it in in the oven there. I don't know that he's ever touched these appliances. I love your point about what could seem like a passing sneaker trend to an adult could be a formative, totally consciousness-shaping moment for a child.

You think about the way that so many younger athletes made interior choices or style choices; they were almost made in the shadow of whatever was going on. The aesthetic choices athletes were making in the mid-to-late '90s, we don't have as much evidence of it, because there wasn't social media, and Cribs didn't start yet, but even if you look at something like Belly, it's influenced by things that were in the air a few years before that.

It does make me wonder. Every basketball player, lots of athletes have stylists, and if they don't, they're working almost in a stylist mentality, where they are truly picking their clothes and selecting them. I wonder if there's going to be the era of athlete interior designer—I'm sure maybe a couple people have it, but if it's going to be more widespread after this.

How bespoke is a home like this? Do you hire a designer and show them a couple clips of laser tag or a Twitch stream, and you just tell them, "Go make it happen"? How does something like this come together? It seems so singular in its point of view.

It takes all kinds. Generally the way these things are done is someone will be put in touch with an interior designer, and they'll maybe have an initial phone call or a conversation with the interior designer and say, "Hey, this is what I like." They'll send them maybe a couple of screenshots, text it to them, and then the designer will come with a few specific examples of what they want, be it a sofa, a couple pieces of furniture, a bespoke, all-encompassing look of what a room would be. I think with this—it's very speculative—it seems like this is what LaMelo might have wanted, and this is what he got. You never know with these things. The truth is always stranger than fiction. Sometimes it's just: LaMelo had a friend, or knew someone who was an interior designer, and was like, Do whatever you want, and that's what they chose.

There's almost no way to have insight on this until [a reporter] will speak to him. During a commercial break in November, we're really gonna understand what it is. We're gonna find out about it by the playoffs. But yeah, that's why it's such an incredible video. The mind boggles. What's the decision-making process here? Usually, when you look at interiors, you can understand it, you can see, OK, this person wanted a modern look. This person wants something minimal. With this ... I don't know.

What's your read on the decor preferences of American pro athletes right now? I know we'll occasionally get an Architectural Digest feature on Jimmy Butler's house, and it seems very much shaped by that [AD] point of view. But this is clearly a different situation. Is this your first exposure to this kind of aesthetic, are you used to seeing more conventional interiors?

I'll be frank: I don't think I've seen an interior like this that wasn't someone making a room for their kid. I'll have to preface it with: I don't follow most pro sports to the extent that I know what a lot of athletes' interiors look like. I know there's one NFL player [Michael Bennett] who designs his own furniture. I'm looking at Jimmy Butler's house, and it's quite nice, but my read is that generally the sort of interior selection that you see in a magazine like Architectural Digest is done off a tear sheet with an interior designer, which means the designer gets the furniture for a certain price, and that's how they make their money. Also, if you have your house featured in AD, it's incredible for you, but it's also incredible for the house's property value. These are investment interiors.

If you can market your property that you might sell when you get traded to a different city as an AD house, really top of the line, inside and out, it helps with the staging. I don't want to diminish it: It's a way to make your house seem more expensive than it is, and it's a way to show off your wealth. I'm not critical of these things in any way, but I do think there is a big incentive, because of the cachet involved in an AD spread, if you're an athlete, to do it a lot more by the book. A lot less vernacular, less idiosyncratic, and that's why I think ultimately the kind of Occam's-razor look at Jimmy Butler's house is it looks pretty much like an AD house, right? Where do you get your information on what interiors look the best? It's through magazines like AD, through interior designers who charge hefty commissions and are in AD, and so on.

It's kind of a closed loop.

It's a very healthy functioning industry if you have a lot of money, but that's almost the way the design industry has moved in the last 50, 60, years. The original American post-war modern designs—really just beautiful, in the MoMA collection—were the IKEA of their day. They were made for your own families. Now design has moved on to this place where it's about—there's always been a great tradition [of this], don't get me wrong—showing off your wealth and having the most impressive house, and I don't think anybody in the industry would be anywhere without it.

The premise of staging for the glossy magazines as a means of asset appreciation makes me feel like this LaMelo house is almost ... it's just out of pure love of the game. Financially, it's a liability—there's probably a handful of people on Earth who are willing to buy this when he sells it. It's crazy.

Very true. That's what makes it jump out. You see it and you're like, Oh, there was no one involved here, this is just him. Again, this is us reading into it, but yeah, this is one person's decision. Also, there definitely wasn't a woman involved.

[Cracking up]

There just wasn't. But there's something nice. I will say: When there's this much money involved, he's gonna get rid of all that stuff. It's not gonna depreciate. Usually, you buy a $15 million or whatever house, the fun in it is making this house your own, putting in a brand-new kitchen. A $1 million kitchen is prohibitively expensive for many regular working people, but for somebody who's spending 20 multiples of that for their house, it's not that much. Anything you have in the house is probably going to be scrapped, because you have that much money, you don't want to live in someone else's hand-me-downs.

But yeah, it's not about appreciation. It's about love for the game. Twenty years ago, he would have been playing college ball up until like 22, 23, or something like that. He effectively got these life-affirming paychecks before he was old enough to drink. This is what happens when you give an 18-year-old millions of dollars, and he's not blowing it—he spent it on his house.

I think what he ended up doing is pretty interesting. What actually jumps out at me is that it's a mashup of a couple different eras of like youth ... boy ... culture, for lack of a better word. There's the Mars 2112 alien stuff going on. You've also got some Fern Gully-era butterflies and fungi, psychedelic imagery in there. Then you've got Rick and Morty and some streamer aesthetics—maybe, like, vape shop. There's just a lot going on here.

There was some throwback. It seems like those are obviously gaming computers. Then there's some other stuff that was not confusing, but these fussy, fancy chandeliers hanging in the kitchen ... are truly kind of confusing to me. Then there's the KAWS. He has the sneakers, and so many of them are neon. And then there's escape-room aesthetics.

Totally, that's a good call.

You know, there might be a massive amount of marijuana use there, but to me it just seems really wholesome. Just actually very sweet, like when kids get to their dorm rooms and they design it themselves. Imagine if you had a six-figure design budget or something. It's just really sweet. I'm gonna be rooting for him this year.

You're also interested in athletic performance. Do you think that this environment is set up for that? What might you change if that became the top priority?

To me it almost hyper isn't, because there's a massive amount of blue light. It seems almost perverse from a Circadian perspective. I don't know how you would be able to relax in that. It just feels intense. But this kid's 24. [For] basketball, they have to be at their best between the hours of 7 and 10 p.m. Their Circadian rhythm is all fucked up. He's going to Minnesota which has, I don't know, probably the second-worst travel schedule in the league, right? Definitely going to be on a lot of flights.

If he enjoys it, he enjoys it. We'll see if he still has a kind of rough Circadian room in his late 20s or early 30s when he's still in the league. Hopefully, he will be. Sometimes you don't want to cut the frog open. I don't know if he can get a good night's sleep in that apartment, but then again, we didn't really get a good look at his bedroom, right?

That's true. That was the missing piece. You obviously have a different point of view than LaMelo Ball, decor-wise. What would you put him onto if you wanted to bridge the gap between his taste and yours?

I don't want to impose my will or any aesthetic on anybody, ultimately. It's what he likes. But I will say, there's a couple of more traditionally beloved and canonical eras of furniture that aren't worlds apart from what he's showing off here. There's the crazier Memphis furniture from the 1980s. One of them had a bed which is called the Tawaraya Ring, and it's basically just a boxing ring that you sleep in.

There's a famous Ettore Sottsass cabinet that wouldn't look that far off from what he has.

Nicola L. is another furniture designer who has these almost cartoony—I don't want to say "transgressive," they're just fun and light but also powerful pieces of furniture. There was that store, Think Big!

The conversation would almost have to come up if he was like, Hey, I feel bad. Everyone online has been bagging on my apartment. I'd say, Well, that's on them, but if you want to keep it fun and light and how you like it, there's actually a lot of stuff that is all-time within that realm. Maybe just give him a couple Memphis books and see what he likes. Ultimately, I think he'd have to arrive at that place on his own. It would just be a very boomer moment if I would say, Hey, you know what? Get rid of the neon and the alien, and put in a piece of furniture that David Bowie used to own.