By Katherine Clarke

Billionaire John Paul DeJoria's Hawaii home has traveled almost as much as he has.

In the 1980s, DeJoria had the Balinese-style home designed and constructed by artisans in Indonesia, then disassembled and shipped to Hawaii's Big Island, where it was rebuilt on a waterfront lot. The process cost "a couple million dollars," said DeJoria, co-founder of the tequila brand Patrón and the hair-care products company John Paul Mitchell Systems.

Now the property -- with a shingled roof designed to resemble dragon skin -- is coming on the market for $32.5 million. Based in Austin, Texas, DeJoria and his wife, Eloise DeJoria, are selling because their real-estate portfolio has grown too large, with more than 10 homes, he said.

Designed in the style of a Balinese temple, the house is well-known in the area. During heavy rains, water spouts from the mouths of carved dragons on the corners of the roof. The roughly 3,600-square-foot, three-bedroom house sits among multiple ponds on Kiholo Bay.

The property is surrounded by a nature preserve and has only a handful of neighbors. "You can run around that place naked and no one knows," said DeJoria, who is known for his trademark ponytail and unpolished persona.

He bought the roughly 3-acre parcel of land in the mid-1980s with a view toward building a vacation home; the lot was near a property then owned by his friend and business partner Paul Mitchell. Around the same time, DeJoria visited a friend in Bali, where he met temple-building artisans in the jungle.

"There were these huts that I'll never forget," he said. "There was a lady there with nothing on above her belly button. She must have been 80 years old, on a dirt floor cooking lunch for everybody. And right next to her were these guys milling wood by hand."

DeJoria proposed an outlandish idea: Could the artisans design and build him a house, then have it shipped to Hawaii? They agreed. DeJoria's friends thought he was crazy, he recalled, telling him: "'Why don't you just build something modern, JP? This is going to take forever.'" Still, he pursued the plan.

It took about four years for the house to be built and assembled in Bali. Then it was dismantled and packed in burlap, piece by piece, for shipping. Each slab of wood was numbered according to where it should be placed once it arrived in Hawaii.

Once the pieces arrived in Hawaii, roughly 50 local carpenters worked on reassembling the house, while about 30 Balinese workers were flown in to oversee their work. DeJoria said the Balinese artisans received the same pay rate as the American workers. "They went back very, very wealthy by their standards," he said.

Once the home was complete, DeJoria filled it with imported antiques from Asia, such as a 200-year-old lounging couch from Taiwan and a pair of Chinese opium beds. Some of the furniture may be available for sale, according to listing agents Anne Hogan Perry and Chris Cortazzo of Compass.

The DeJorias have homes around the world, including a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, R.I., and a home in Malibu, Calif. They have decided to sell some of the homes they use the least, he said, and the long flight from Texas to Hawaii means they have spent only a few nights in the Kiholo Bay house in the past few years.

The Big Island's Kona Coast has commanded multimillion-dollar sales in recent years, the listing agents said. In 2021, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman bought a 21.8-acre oceanfront estate in Kailua-Kona for $43 million, for instance. He has since relisted it for $49 million.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 12, 2026 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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