Big Return

As her fifteen-month suspension lifts, Maria Sharapova sits down with Jonathan Van Meter to discuss what happened and what comes next.

- Jonathan Van Meter

I would not have taken Maria Sharapova for a tea person. But here we are, standing in her kitchen parsing the finer points of grated ginger and stainless-steel infusers. I don’t even drink tea, but we both have rotten colds, so Sharapova has conjured the most delicious hot beverage I’ve ever tasted in a teapot made entirely of glass. The elixir is electric greenish-yellow— the color of a tennis ball—and one of the only splashes of color in the pristine white-and-gray Minimalist house that Sharapova spent three years building in Manhattan Beach, California.

You would never know a tennis player lives here. “Nowhere will you find a clue,” she says, laughing. But you will find other clues—about its occupant’s interest in modern art, architecture, and good design. There are large paintings by Joe Goode and Chris Gwaltney; a floor lamp topped with a white-feather shade that, when lit, looks like a giant peony; and a framed black-and-white photograph of a very young Marilyn Monroe. A glass wall runs the length of the kitchen and living room, with sliding doors opening to a pool that laps right up against the side of the house. “This was as close as they could get it,” she says.