The CEO of Slack and the CEO of Away found their dream home in a 109-year-old Southampton mansion that was gut renovated to give it the all-white look of something from Selling Sunset, which seems exactly right for tech founders in love. Stewart Butterfield and Jen Rubio paid $32 million for the house, which was originally designed by architect Grosvenor Atterbury, who designed the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As The Wall Street Journal reported, after Two Trees developer David Walentas bought the mansion for $11.6 million in 2019, he spent $10 million on the aforementioned modernizing reno of what was once a country manor. He called it a “weekend” project, intending to donate the money from the sale to his alma mater, the University of Virginia. “It was a great old mansion, but it was a total wreck,” Walentas said.
Now it is a great old mansion with stark, minimalist interiors, a yoga studio, his and hers Pelotons, 11 bedrooms, white-marbled bathrooms, and walls that range from cream to eggshell. The house was first listed last April and apparently had just the right look for the couple responsible for making your office go silent and making sure your phone never loses charge on work trips. (To be clear, Rubio is not the Away co-founder who stepped down for yelling at her employees on Slack, then returned weeks later after deciding it was a “mistake to fall on her sword,” then stepped down again later that year. She’s the other one.)
The house feels like a perfect match for the couple — just the place where you can imagine an Away bag open (but very neatly composed) in one corner while the distant pings of Slack echo from one of nearly a dozen bedrooms.
