Phoenix Suns Owner Is Tearing Down 5 Homes to Build Massive Estate.
Mortgage magnate Mat Ishbia does nothing small.
In Pontiac, he runs the nation's biggest mortgage company. In Phoenix, he's majority owner of two pro basketball teams, the men’s Suns and women’s Mercury.
Soon, in Bloomfield Township, Ishbia will own Michigan’s largest occupied house, estimated to be at least 60,000 square feet when it’s complete, says the township assessor’s office. What's bigger is Michigan’s largest unoccupied house. It's the 85,000-square-foot Meadow Brook Hall, built in the 1920s by Dodge auto heiress Matilda Wilson, who gave it to Oakland University as a conference center. No one lives at Meadow Brook Hall. But Ishbia will occupy his new house, to sit on about 14 acres that he'll assemble by tearing down five houses.
One of those tear-downs is where he lives now. It's a 22,000-square-foot house that Ishbia built after demolishing two other houses, both of them 1950s ranch houses — the style that was hot in the nation's housing boom after World War II. Aging ranch houses sometimes gain additions, growing up with second stories, or out with new kitchens and family rooms. In affluent areas, they've been leveled for the last two decades, making way for new, more fashionable and much larger houses. Nowhere in Michigan, however, have ranch houses made way for anything this big.
Ishbia's current house is by no means an expendable ranch. It's only eight years old, has won design awards and starred in glossy design magazines. It seems far too new to destroy. But a lot can happen in eight years to someone viewed by Forbes magazine as Michigan's fourth-wealthiest individual, with $4.5 billion in assets as of 2022.
The Free Press offered the opportunity to comment to Ishbia, through a spokeswoman, and to his architect; neither responded.
But Ishbia's plans for his big new house, and especially his big new yard, have become the talk of the neighborhood.
“He’s building an amusement park,” one neighbor said. Details came on July 11 at a township meeting of the zoning board of appeals. At such meetings, most petitioners approach with just one or two requests, such as, “May I build a bigger garage and a taller fence than usual?” Ishbia approached — actually, his team of architects and lawyers approached — with 13 requests. They'd appeared at a previous meeting with even more requests. Before the recent one, they'd pleased the zoning board by dropping plans for a go-kart track, go-kart garage and lighted observation platform. Although the karts were to be electric, township officials and neighbors worried that they'd hear squealing tires and see the upscale bleachers.
The updated roster of backyard amenities had a magic number — 14. Attorney Trey Brice told board members that almost none of the backyard features would exceed that height, and many had been dropped to 10 feet to please the zoning honchos. Among items needing approval? A “t
