JJ Watt's Houses: Houston and a Wisconsin Log Cabin

JJ Watt no longer owns the Houston house or the Wisconsin log cabin. He sold the first in 2022, his last NFL season, and the second in 2023, soon after he retired.

His first Houston-area house, in Pearland, was up for sale by September 2016.

Watt was born in Waukesha, grew up in Pewaukee, and was drafted by the Houston Texans in 2011. By January 2015, four seasons into a career that would bring three Defensive Player of the Year awards, he had bought a log house on rural land in the county he grew up in and was training there.

It stands in the Village of Summit, a Waukesha County community that incorporated as a village in 2010 and uses Oconomowoc mailing addresses, which is why the cabin turns up under both names. The map pin and the cabin's own story are on JJ Watt's former Wisconsin cabin.

A cabin in the middle of nowhere

Watt called the place minimalistic when he described it that first winter, as Sports Illustrated reported in January 2015. “The only thing I have to focus on is training and that's the way I like it. There's no frills, there's nothing to distract you up here.” He put its location as the middle of nowhere. The description did not survive the spring. In March 2015 the property's sale photographs went around the sports press, and they showed a roomy log house on a good deal of land, not a one-room shack. Watt's answer, as Fox Sports reported it, was that there had been a miscommunication. The house dates from 1997, according to OnMilwaukee's report on it that month.

He did use it for training. In 2016 he invited more than 20 Texans teammates to the cabin to work out together and flew them in on his private jet, ESPN's Tania Ganguli reported, as Fox Sports relayed it that March. Jadeveon Clowney was in the photo from the trip, Fox Sports noted.

He sold it in 2023, a transfer on file with the Waukesha County Register of Deeds, for more than double what he had paid, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. The buyers stay unnamed here.

Where he went next

The same Journal Sentinel report said Watt was living in Arizona by then. He had signed with the Arizona Cardinals in 2021 and played his final two seasons there.

Pearland, then Memorial

The Pearland house, in the suburb south of the city, was bought in 2011, his rookie year, according to Bisnow and Complex. KPRC reported in September 2016 that it was for sale and called it the place Watt had lived for years.

The house that replaced it is in Memorial, the wooded district of west Houston. It started as a spec house, one a builder puts up before anyone has agreed to buy it. The Houston Chronicle's Diane Cowen reported in February 2022 that Watt bought it while it was still under construction, early enough to pick the finishes. Its page is JJ Watt's former Houston house.

That Chronicle story ran under a cautious headline, calling the house only likely owned by Watt, and it reported a price cut. Harris County's deed records settle what the paper would not. The house was his, and he sold it in 2022.

For another NFL star's houses, read Patrick Mahomes' Kansas City homes.