Anže Kopitar spent two decades as the backbone of the Los Angeles Kings — captaining the franchise, winning two Stanley Cup championships, and retiring as the team’s all-time scoring leader after surpassing a record that stood for over 45 years. Off the ice, he poured that same long-term focus into a different kind of project: a custom-built compound in Manhattan Beach, California, that listed at $37 million in October 2023, setting the highest asking price the coastal city had ever seen.
The Anže Kopitar house isn’t a trophy purchase or an absentee investment property. It’s a ground-up rebuild on a rare double walk-street lot, half a block from the Pacific, featuring a disappearing pool powered by mechanical engineering and enough solar and smart-home infrastructure to operate off the grid.
Here’s how it was built, what’s inside, and where it sits in Manhattan Beach’s ultra-luxury market.
Who Is Anže Kopitar?
Born in Jesenice, Slovenia, Kopitar was drafted 11th overall by the Kings in 2005 and debuted in the NHL the following season. Over the next twenty years, he became the franchise’s all-time points leader — finishing with more than 1,300 points in over 1,500 games — and helped deliver Stanley Cup titles in 2012 and 2014.
He won the Selke Trophy as the league’s top defensive forward in 2015–16 and 2017–18, served as team captain from 2016 through his final season, and announced his retirement at age 38 after the 2024–25 campaign. Every one of his NHL games was played in a Kings uniform — a rarity in modern professional sports.
That career background matters for the property story because the Manhattan Beach compound wasn’t a snap decision. Kopitar and his wife, Ines, bought, planned, and rebuilt it over several years while he was still active in the league. It was a deliberate, phased project — the kind of thing you only undertake when you know you’re staying.
The Location: 117 34th Street, Manhattan Beach Sand Section
The compound sits at 117 34th Street in the Manhattan Beach sand section — the city’s most desirable residential zone. The street is a walk street, meaning pedestrian-only: no car traffic passes directly in front of the home. The beach is a half-block walk from the front door.
For anyone unfamiliar with Manhattan Beach’s geography, walk-street lots are a specific and finite category. The city isn’t creating new ones. They sit in the sand section — the flat, beach-adjacent grid where homes trade at the highest premiums per square foot in the city. And double walk-street lots, like Kopitar’s, are rarer still: the western lot would normally hold a second home, but here it contains the guest house, the pool deck, and provides the unobstructed ocean-view corridor that defines the property’s sightlines.
Manhattan Beach itself occupies a distinct niche in Southern California’s luxury market. It combines genuine beach access with top-rated public schools, a tight residential character, and proximity to the broader Los Angeles job market. For athletes, entertainers, and executives based in central LA, it offers something that Malibu — with its longer commute and more dispersed layout — typically can’t: a walkable community where the beach is part of daily life, not a weekend destination.
How the Anže Kopitar House Was Built
In November 2014, Kopitar purchased two neighboring homes for a combined $10 million. Over the next several years, he demolished both structures and replaced them with a single unified compound, completed in 2018.
This wasn’t a renovation. It was a from-scratch rebuild — every wall, every system, every finish designed as part of one coherent plan. The floor plans connect logically between the main house and guest structure. The outdoor spaces were laid out as a single vision. The infrastructure — solar generation, battery storage, smart-home automation, the mechanical pool system — was integrated during construction rather than retrofitted afterward.
Because both lots were developed simultaneously, the compound has the spatial coherence of a single-property build while occupying the footprint of two. That’s a meaningful distinction in a market where most “double-lot” configurations are just two adjacent structures with a doorway cut between them.
The asking price of $37 million represents $27 million more than what the Kopitars originally paid for the two homes. The difference reflects the cost of land assembly, demolition, multi-year construction, and the premium that the finished product commands as a unified estate rather than a pair of houses.
Size, Layout, and Configuration
Here are the core specs:
- 7,605 square feet of total living space
- 7 bedrooms — 5 in the main house, 2 in the guest house
- 10 bathrooms — 8 in the main house, 2 in the guest house
- Double walk-street lot, half a block from the sand
- Custom-built in 2018
- Four-stop elevator connecting all levels
- Parking for five vehicles
The four-stop elevator deserves a mention beyond the spec sheet. In a multi-story home designed around ocean views at every level, vertical circulation isn’t a convenience — it’s what makes the layout actually work for a family and for guests. Stairs alone would render the upper and lower floors impractical for daily use.
Interior: The Rooms and Finishes
The main house includes dedicated spaces for a home theater, gym, and office — the kind of purpose-built rooms that signal a house designed for full-time living, not a beach house used on weekends .
Living Room
The living room anchors the social floor with a fireplace, custom built-ins, and glass doors that open onto a fireside balcony. That balcony is fitted with a pair of suspended swing sofas — a specific design choice that captures the Southern California indoor-outdoor lifestyle without feeling like a set piece.
kitchen
The kitchen is built around a La Cornue range — a French manufacturer whose handcrafted stoves are more commonly found in Michelin-starred restaurants than in residential homes. The rest of the kitchen is equipped accordingly: a wine cooler, dual refrigerators, and an eat-in island. An adjacent dining area opens onto a partially enclosed balcony with a built-in barbecue station.
Primary Suite
The primary suite occupies its own zone with a walk-in closet, an ocean-view balcony, and a bathroom finished with dual vanities, a soaking tub, and a separate shower.
Climate-controlled wine storage rounds out the interior — a feature that, at this price point, serves as both a lifestyle amenity and a genuine preservation system for a serious collection.
The Disappearing Pool: AKVO Spiralift Technology
Every luxury home in Manhattan Beach has a pool. The Anže Kopitar house has one that can vanish.
The western lot hosts a pool and spa powered by AKVO Spiralift technology — a mechanical system that raises and lowers the pool floor at the touch of a button. Lowered, it’s a full swimming pool and spa. Raised flush with the surrounding deck, the space converts into a flat courtyard for entertaining. The transformation happens without displacing any water.
This solves a real problem for beach-adjacent lots in Manhattan Beach: square footage is limited, and dedicating a permanent footprint to a pool creates an either-or tradeoff with usable outdoor living space. The Spiralift system eliminates that compromise. One footprint, two functions.
It’s the kind of feature that separates a property from its comparables — not because it’s extravagant, but because it’s architecturally distinctive in a way that’s difficult and expensive to replicate. For a compound already defined by its rarity (double lot, walk street, ground-up construction), the disappearing pool adds another layer of differentiation that standard luxury finishes cannot match.
Outdoor Living and Entertainment
The outdoor spaces are built for serious entertaining, not just curb appeal.
A Lynx outdoor kitchen — a professional-grade brand engineered for permanent outdoor installation — includes a pizza oven and two dedicated barbecues. That’s not a weekend grilling station. It’s a kitchen designed to handle catering-level volume for large gatherings without anyone going back inside.
Privacy on a walk street takes careful management. These streets see foot traffic — residents, joggers, beachgoers passing within feet of the property line. Tall hedges screen the compound from street-level visibility while the ocean-facing orientation keeps Pacific views open from interior rooms and upper-level vantage points.
Two upstairs patios on the main house are designed for barbecues and lounging by an outdoor fireplace — positioned above the hedge line to capture views while staying sheltered from the pedestrian flow below.
Smart Home Systems and Sustainability
The technology stack was installed during the 2018 build, not added afterward. That distinction matters — integrated systems behave differently (and more reliably) than devices bolted onto existing infrastructure.
- Solar panels generate a significant share of the home’s energy
- Tesla Powerwall battery storage captures excess solar production and allows the home to operate independently from the grid during outages
- Lutron automatic shades manage heat gain and natural light levels throughout the day without manual adjustment
- Full home automation controls lighting, climate, security, and shading from a unified system
The solar-plus-battery approach is well suited to a Southern California coastal location. Manhattan Beach gets consistent sun exposure year-round, making the return on energy investment practical rather than aspirational. Combined with the Lutron shades — which reduce cooling load during peak hours — the systems work together as a coherent efficiency strategy rather than a collection of independent gadgets.
The Guest House
The two-bedroom, two-bathroom guest house operates as a fully self-contained residence with its own living area, kitchen, and rooftop deck.
This isn’t a converted garage or a bedroom above the pool house. It’s a standalone structure that gives guests — or family, or live-in staff — genuine independence from the main home. No shared living spaces to negotiate. No hallway traffic. The rooftop deck adds a Pacific-facing vantage point that sits above the main house sightline, offering views that the primary structure’s own patios don’t capture from the same angle.
For resale purposes, a legally distinct guest structure also carries a different value proposition than attached guest rooms. It increases the property’s functional versatility without increasing the main home’s footprint.
Why $37 Million? Pricing the Anže Kopitar House
At $37 million, the compound sits well above anything else Manhattan Beach has listed. For context, the city’s median home sale price hovered around $2.5 million in late 2023. Recent ultra-luxury listings in the area have included a $30 million Strand compound, a $20 million Hill Section estate, and a neighboring property on The Strand listed at $21 million. None approached $37 million.
Several factors justify the gap:
- Land scarcity. Double walk-street lots in the sand section are a finite resource. The western lot — guest house, pool deck, unobstructed ocean-view corridor — is what elevates this property beyond single-lot homes that trade at significantly lower prices.
- Construction currency. The 2018 ground-up build means every system, finish, and mechanical component is current-generation. Buyers at this tier don’t want to inherit someone else’s 15-year-old HVAC or dated kitchen. They want a property that performs without near-term capital expenditure.
- Technological differentiation. The AKVO Spiralift pool, integrated solar-plus-battery system, and La Cornue kitchen are individually uncommon in Manhattan Beach. Their combination at a single property is rare in any coastal market.
- Comparable scarcity. There’s no clean apples-to-apples transaction comp in Manhattan Beach’s history. When comparables are thin, pricing conversations become less anchored — which creates risk for the seller but also opportunity if the right buyer recognizes what’s being offered.
Local real estate agents have noted that Manhattan Beach has been historically undervalued relative to Malibu and Beverly Hills, with one predicting that $20 million-plus listings would become more common as the market adjusts to demand. At the same time, experts caution that Manhattan Beach’s smaller lot sizes will likely prevent it from matching Malibu’s ultra-luxury volume — the average Manhattan Beach lot is roughly 4,800 square feet compared to Malibu’s 64,400. Properties like Kopitar’s, built on assembled double lots, are the exception that proves that constraint.
Off the Market
The Anže Kopitar house is no longer listed for sale. Per the listing records, property details have been removed at the request of the owner and listing agent. Whether the compound sold privately, was withdrawn for a future relisting, or is being held off-market is not publicly confirmed.
The original listing was held by June Emerson of Vista Sotheby’s International Realty.
Conclusion
The Anže Kopitar house in Manhattan Beach is a case study in what happens when a franchise athlete applies both capital and patience to the place he lives. Two adjacent homes were acquired, demolished, and replaced with a single compound that functions as a coherent estate — not a pair of houses stitched together.
The $37 million asking price was the highest in the city’s history, and it was grounded in specific, verifiable attributes: a rare double walk-street lot, ground-up 2018 construction, technology that most comparable properties don’t offer, and half-block proximity to the Pacific. Whether the property ultimately transacts near that figure or settles at a different number, it remains one of the most distinctive residential compounds Manhattan Beach has produced.
For Kopitar — who broke Marcel Dionne’s 45-year-old franchise scoring record, retired as the Kings’ all-time leader in games played, and spent his entire NHL career in a single city — the house is one more thing built with intention in a place he chose to call home.
