LOS ANGELES — No one needs a $30,000 hand-crafted, 24K-gold plated stained-glass basketball hoop with an accompanying Swarovski crystal net. But that hasn’t stopped artist Victor Solomon from dedicating years of his life to their painstaking creation.
Solomon, the NBA’s latest king of bling, toils deep within a nondescript industrial building—its flat concrete exterior painted black and its address barely visible—surrounded by auto shops, recycling centers and towing companies right off Interstate-10 in East LA. He spends upwards of 200 hours taking a single project from concept to finished product in his lightly-furnished one-room workshop, accompanied only by the voices in his earbuds, which range from Slate’s Watergate podcast to The Skyliners, the 1960s doo-wop group.