Today, AD is welcomed by Diplo to tour his private jungle paradise in Jamaica. Since the beginning of his career, Jamaica has been a significant haven of inspiration for the Grammy award-winning DJ and producer so it made perfect sense as the location for his own tropical retreat. After purchasing an ambitious 50 acres of land, Diplo assembled an inspired team of artists to help bring his vision to life over the next 10 years. The years of work have resulted in an indoor-outdoor concrete villa clinging to the lush hillside. Bridges, trellises, and breezeways connect the space, allowing the jungle to weave into the home as if one. Now Diplo walks around his new home confident that his dreams have been realized through these years of hard work. “This project was all about patience. There were so many ways that it could have failed, but we kept finding solutions. I thought that, if nothing else, at least I own a bunch of banana trees.”See more of Diplo's jungle home hereBiota, Part IV | Sofia LondonoNicatiuh 2023 | Pedro ReyesTemoa 2023 | Pedro Reyes
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 All right, baby, come on.
00:01 Hey, D, welcome to Jamaica.
00:07 This is my place right here.
00:08 This is the farm, but the house is up on top of the hill.
00:11 Let's go check it out.
00:12 (upbeat music)
00:15 We got a bunch of horses on the property.
00:28 This one's called Ruckebye.
00:29 That was our first horse.
00:30 Plus, Jamaica has a really, really deep horse culture.
00:33 A lot of polo riders here, a lot of horse racing here,
00:37 and a lot of horses ride on the beach.
00:42 We grow a lot of bananas here, a lot of pineapples,
00:45 a lot of sweet potatoes, sorrel, jackfruit.
00:48 We have another horse named Lil Wes,
00:50 and his dad is here.
00:51 His name is Megan Thee Stallion.
00:53 (upbeat music)
00:55 (upbeat music)
00:58 Come on, let me show you the house.
01:05 It's called Pompeii.
01:06 We're here in Portland, Jamaica.
01:08 This is the entryway.
01:09 I love that you can walk through the house,
01:11 and you already see a sort of picture of what we have,
01:14 the wilderness of Jamaica.
01:15 A landscape, for me, is a piece of art,
01:17 so we frame it like that.
01:19 I've been coming to Jamaica for almost 20 years
01:21 to record, to make music.
01:22 We've done a lot of concerts here.
01:24 I have a group called Major Lazer,
01:25 and we've had some huge records,
01:26 and I think I owe a lot of my success to this place,
01:28 to Jamaica.
01:29 You know, the ambient sound of this place is birds,
01:32 dance hall, wind, waves.
01:35 I love all those sounds, you know?
01:37 And that's kind of what Jamaica is.
01:38 It's beautiful, peaceful,
01:39 but also electric and crazy all the time.
01:41 I found this, a 50-acre piece of land,
01:45 and I had a vision for what I wanted to build,
01:47 and you know, seven years later, we've got it finished,
01:50 and it's really a beautiful place.
01:51 It's what I call my home away from home.
01:53 Let's go through the house.
01:54 (upbeat music)
01:57 This is our main dining table.
02:04 This is where we all eat.
02:05 Everything is open air.
02:06 That's what I love about Jamaica.
02:08 And this pool, this infinity pool,
02:10 just kind of like hovers over the jungle.
02:12 Like when you get in the pool,
02:13 you just have a view of this amazing little valley
02:16 right here at my farm,
02:17 and it really is like the heart of the whole house,
02:19 where everybody can meet, they can eat,
02:21 they can party, they can swim, they can relax,
02:23 and all the bedrooms kind of flow into this area,
02:25 and I love that.
02:26 (upbeat music)
02:29 The mural is made by Sofia Londono.
02:35 It's plant cells, designed in California,
02:37 and then she came with all the pieces here
02:38 and laid it out and put it on our wall for us,
02:40 and it's one of my favorite parts of the house.
02:42 It's also an outdoor shower,
02:43 so you can just stand there and relax and cool off.
02:47 My neighbor made this beautiful bench.
02:49 His name is Johnny.
02:50 He also tunes my pianos.
02:51 This coffee table was actually one of the crates
02:54 that Suf's was shipped in.
02:55 We just love the way it looks,
02:56 so we painted over it
02:57 and used it as a really good coffee table.
02:58 It's beautiful.
02:59 (upbeat music)
03:02 Everything's open here,
03:09 even the kitchen opens right up to the pool.
03:11 You cook some food here,
03:13 serve it on this beautiful table.
03:15 This is some of the produce
03:15 that we do grow here on the property.
03:17 We have some papayas.
03:19 A lot of pineapples grow here,
03:21 and some oranges,
03:22 and we have a thousand bananas.
03:24 I pulled all these up out of the tree today for you guys.
03:27 We'll make some banana bread later.
03:28 And we also have our own Pompei ashtrays
03:34 if you want to smoke a little ganja.
03:35 We grow that too, too, so.
03:36 We just became legal in Jamaica in the last five years.
03:39 Did you guys know that?
03:40 It was illegal for forever.
03:43 But mushrooms have always been legal in Jamaica.
03:45 It's a thing here.
03:46 (upbeat music)
03:48 (upbeat music)
03:51 This is my living room.
03:58 It's a beautiful piece here by Pedro Reyes.
03:59 We have some of his sculptures in the property,
04:01 a Mexican sculptor.
04:02 What I love about this property is the poured concrete.
04:05 This is something no one's really done in the Caribbean,
04:07 and it took us a long time to get it right,
04:09 but it was really worth it.
04:10 I love Brazilian architecture.
04:12 Really the brutalist look is what I love about this place.
04:14 Big shout out to my architects, FreeCell.
04:16 They're based in New York.
04:17 They did an amazing job with us.
04:19 When you walk in, you get to see this beautiful landscape.
04:23 Right there is the Caribbean Sea.
04:25 If you look on a clear day, you can see Cuba.
04:27 You can entertain here.
04:29 My children like to come here and play on the piano
04:30 and they get in.
04:31 And when it's really hot,
04:32 we jump off this balcony into the pool.
04:34 Come on.
04:36 Do a little back flip for you guys.
04:38 (water splashing)
04:47 I didn't die.
04:48 Oh, I forgot my phone's in my pocket.
04:51 - Oh yeah. - I'm joking.
04:53 (upbeat music)
04:55 This is a sculpture of a breadfruit.
05:02 If you're Jamaican, you know what that is.
05:03 It's like a staple of the food here.
05:04 It was by Veronica Ryan.
05:06 I'm one of the only people to own one of these pieces.
05:08 It was commissioned for the English government.
05:09 She has a bunch of sculptures
05:11 all around the National Museum there,
05:13 and she's an amazing Caribbean sculptor.
05:15 It's made out of bronze, a giant breadfruit.
05:17 (upbeat music)
05:20 All right, here we are.
05:32 This is my bedroom, the primary bedroom.
05:34 It's hot in Jamaica.
05:35 It's really hot.
05:36 In the summer times, it's like over 100 degrees.
05:39 Even in the winter times, you're like 70, 80 degrees.
05:41 So we like to open up all the windows.
05:44 We made sure we could do that when we built this house.
05:46 So there's always a breeze coming through here.
05:48 We have AC, of course,
05:49 but it's nice to just have a breeze
05:50 all the way through the house.
05:51 You have this beautiful view.
05:53 Over here is the Blue Lagoon.
05:54 You can see it.
05:56 That's the Blue Lagoon.
05:57 It's my favorite place to go swimming in, just to visit.
05:59 If you come to Jamaica, you must go to the Blue Lagoon.
06:02 It's a natural spring water that just bubbles up
06:06 from the depths of Jamaica,
06:08 and it's a beautiful place to party and swim,
06:10 and they have some free diving contests there as well,
06:12 so it's famous for that.
06:13 (gentle guitar music)
06:16 Okay.
06:19 One of my favorite places in this house
06:21 is this primary bedroom.
06:23 I love these headboards.
06:25 They were made by my carpenter named Bill,
06:27 who, you know, with us,
06:28 we designed all of the furniture in here.
06:31 The bed was made by him,
06:32 and this is a piece of wood we got from California
06:34 that he shaped.
06:35 It looks amazing.
06:36 This is a nice Italian typewriter.
06:38 Our first guest did write an amazing message,
06:40 and we have it saved.
06:41 It says, "I want to be the best at everything."
06:43 We have our own letterhead, though.
06:44 Isn't that beautiful?
06:46 Look at the attention to detail.
06:48 If you come here and you want to write a letter
06:49 back to your mother or whatever,
06:50 you have a whole notepad from Pompeii.
06:52 Very nice.
06:53 (upbeat music)
06:56 This property is actually called Pompeii.
07:05 I didn't make that name up.
07:06 When I bought the deed, it was called Pompeii,
07:08 but spelled incorrectly, P-O-M-P-E-I.
07:11 So we got some of these big, giant vases
07:15 from the actual Pompeii in Italy
07:17 that were covered by centuries of ash.
07:21 So we just, we found them and we restored them.
07:24 (upbeat music)
07:25 This one had, like, weird stuff inside, bones and stuff.
07:28 Got the bathroom here,
07:30 with a nice Japanese toilet, very expensive.
07:33 Probably too dark for you guys,
07:35 but anyway, it moves like that.
07:38 Look at that, all automatic, heated seats.
07:40 Sauna, infrared.
07:44 The main shower and the cold plunge,
07:45 so you go back and forth, do sauna.
07:48 In cold, this is 36 degrees, keep it very icy.
07:51 As you come into the main part of the bathroom,
07:53 we have the hibiscus, which is,
07:55 everywhere in Jamaica you have hibiscus.
07:56 It makes great tea.
07:58 I love these chairs.
07:59 I'm a big chair guy.
08:00 They're more an accent for this beautiful bathroom.
08:02 Very nice collectibles.
08:03 When I'm in here, I definitely use this spa
08:07 more than any room, because I love to take time for myself
08:10 and my guests.
08:11 When you invite somebody over, you do the sauna,
08:12 you do the cold plunge, you jump in the bath there.
08:15 The gym is down the bottom floor,
08:16 so that's five floors down, so you do get a lot of exercise.
08:20 We have some vintage equipment.
08:22 We have a climbing wall, which is very rare for a home gym.
08:25 And there's two floors.
08:26 The first floor is for our weights and our stretching area,
08:28 and upstairs is our cardio equipment.
08:30 And I love to just use this room and just relax.
08:33 (upbeat music)
08:37 This is the library.
08:38 Come on.
08:39 And it's a real library, full of a thousand books, records.
08:45 It's very important to know your neighbors
08:46 and have neighbors and be part of a community.
08:48 And if you move to this part of Jamaica,
08:50 you're probably an eclectic person,
08:52 or you love nature, you love to swim,
08:54 or you love reggae music.
08:55 And my neighbor, she wanted to move back to Belgium.
08:57 She was a big reggae fan, and all these are her records.
09:00 Amazing stuff.
09:01 These are some of the best unplayed
09:03 reggae and Afrobeat records I've ever seen.
09:05 And some of the best records I've ever found.
09:07 When I designed this room,
09:09 I really told my architects, like, I need a library.
09:11 And I want it to be two floors.
09:12 I want it to look like something from Harry Potter,
09:14 where you can go upstairs and get lost in the books,
09:16 get lost in the records,
09:17 get lost in some of the old magazines.
09:19 So we made it like that.
09:20 You can get up here on the mezzanine,
09:22 as you look at the beautiful jungle beside you.
09:25 I want people to come here and be inspired.
09:27 Find things they've never seen before,
09:29 read things they've never read before.
09:31 You can come to this room
09:31 and have no idea what you're doing,
09:33 pick a page, find a passage that you like,
09:37 and be inspired.
09:38 That's what's amazing about this place.
09:39 And it's analog, you know?
09:42 I love that about this room.
09:43 (upbeat music)
09:46 Follow me to the cannon.
09:53 I want to show you something special.
09:54 When we were first constructing this property, excavating,
09:57 we found this old cannon from the British empire.
10:01 So we just dug it up and positioned it right here.
10:04 There's a real cannon right here.
10:06 Not many people have one of these.
10:08 Let's go check out the studio.
10:09 (upbeat music)
10:11 This is the part that pays for the whole house.
10:24 This is where the music is made, the magic is made.
10:26 This is the live room of Pompeii Studios.
10:30 We only opened up a couple months ago,
10:31 so I'm mostly in the mixing room, mixing as a producer,
10:34 but I've played some piano, a couple of records.
10:36 We've had a couple of guys here recording.
10:37 One big Jamaican artist, Kronix, was here.
10:40 He's also a neighbor of mine.
10:42 This is actually my first proper music studio.
10:44 I've always been a bedroom producer.
10:45 I've always had a studio in one of my rooms in my house.
10:48 So to build a fully functioning studio
10:50 was a very big deal for me.
10:52 I wanted it to be something
10:53 that anybody could be comfortable in,
10:55 whether you're a band or you're a pop star,
10:57 you're doing a soundtrack,
10:58 but it definitely harkens to the seventies.
11:00 It's got that vibe with all our accessories
11:03 and double-pane glass.
11:04 Some of the last people to record here,
11:05 we have some of their notes.
11:07 If you can see it on, if you can see it with the camera,
11:09 song ideas and some lyrics.
11:13 I might track a couple of things in here
11:14 because I've watched a couple of your AD open doors
11:17 and I tell you, the music is atrocious,
11:19 but I'm gonna do some songs for you guys
11:21 so we can hear how I want it to be.
11:24 (upbeat music)
11:29 So let's see the rest of the studio.
11:31 We have the live room, we have the mixing room
11:34 and we have one of the best lounges
11:36 I've ever seen in a studio.
11:37 So I'll show you guys that right now.
11:39 (upbeat music)
11:42 Here we are at the lounge of the studio.
11:52 This is a great place to decompress and relax
11:55 between takes and making music.
11:58 We got a ping pong table.
12:00 You could tell a good musician if they're good at ping pong
12:03 because every studio has ping pong
12:06 or they've been to jail
12:06 'cause they're good at ping pong too.
12:08 But Justin Bieber is really good at ping pong
12:11 'cause he's in the studio a lot.
12:12 And like the rest of the house,
12:14 this is also open to the environment.
12:17 You can be recording and then a cow or a goat will walk by
12:20 and just add to your palette of inspiration.
12:23 This is poly-K.
12:24 So every video game in the world of all time
12:27 is inside this box right here.
12:29 I'll put it here just if I work with somebody
12:30 and they have like a problem,
12:31 me and we have like a decision to make.
12:33 I challenge them to a game of Mortal Kombat
12:34 or Street Fighter or Mike Tyson's Punch Out
12:37 or Ninja Turtles and Simpsons is a good way
12:40 to be team building 'cause you play four players.
12:42 I'm the best at all these games.
12:43 I beat anybody in these games.
12:45 I lost.
12:50 We have a really cool bedroom down here,
12:53 the secret bedroom,
12:53 because this is one of my first studios I've ever built.
12:56 Call me a bedroom studio guy.
12:58 And we actually recreated a bedroom studio
13:00 underneath the studio.
13:01 All right, guys, I've shown you everything.
13:19 The farm, the house, the studio,
13:21 the wellness retreat, the gym.
13:25 Now I gotta go to work,
13:26 so I'm gonna go ahead and ride this horse onto the sunset.
13:29 Let's go, baby.
13:30 Come on.
13:31 And I'll catch you guys later.
13:33 Love you, AD.
13:34 (upbeat music)
13:37 (gunshots)
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