Celebrity Homes in Los Angeles: The Neighborhoods and the Houses

Celebrity homes in Los Angeles gather in a handful of neighborhoods, and most of those neighborhoods were one person's plan before they were anyone's address. An oilman laid out Bel Air in 1923. A department store founder named Holmby Hills after the English village where he was born. A ranch widow leased the first lots of the Malibu Colony to movie people in 1926 to pay her lawyers, and an Ohio transplant planted a Los Feliz hilltop with 50,000 trees before it was subdivided as Laughlin Park. The rules those founders wrote still shape who lives where, and how much of a house you can see from the street.

This page walks through seven homes on the Velvet Ropes map in five of those neighborhoods, from a film director's hillside in Bel Air to the estate Cecil B. DeMille lived in for 43 years. Each one links to its profile, where the photographs, the county record, and the pin live. The exact street address is the one thing we hold back. These are private homes, revealing the address is the paid step on each profile, and that step is what keeps the rest of the Los Angeles map free.

Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills have pages of their own, linked near the end. This one starts west of them.

Bel Air: the oilman who would not sell to actors

Alphonzo Bell had struck oil near Whittier when he bought the Danzinger family estate in 1922, according to the Bel Air Association, the homeowners' group formed in 1942. The first tract he filed, in 1923, held 128 house lots, and his wife gave the streets their Italian names: Bellagio, Nimes, St. Pierre. The association's own history calls his refusal to let Hollywood actors buy in “Mr. Bell's infamous policy,” and goes on to note the celebrities who settled there anyway. Today the Starline celebrity bus route runs through it.

Michael Bay bought his Bel Air lot in 2009 with a 1951 house on it, built for Earle Jorgensen, a member of Ronald Reagan's kitchen cabinet, and had that house torn down. Miami architect Chad Oppenheim designed the replacement, dug into the hillside on three levels with the city below and the valleys behind, and the longer of its two pools runs almost 300 feet. The county roll dates the finished house to 2013. Tatler Asia, writing about it in 2016, described a 50-seat theater and a prop museum where the Bumblebee car from Transformers sits on a turntable set into the floor. Bay still owns it: a lawsuit he filed in 2026 says a Cadillac came through the gate fence and hedges in September 2024 while he was out of state. Michael Bay's Bel Air house has the parcel record and the build.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z bought theirs in 2017 from the family that built it. Irish developer Dean McKillen put it up, and his brother Tyrone, a Dublin-born agent in Los Angeles, brokered the sale, according to The Irish Times. The architect was Paul McClean, whose small Orange County office W Magazine profiled that year, putting the approvals and construction at about four years. The county roll dates the finished house to 2016, shows a 2018 reassessment that reflects the Carters' purchase, and records no change of ownership since. The Los Angeles Times reported the closing in August 2017, and International Business Times later put the price at $88M. The house is on our map as Beyoncé and Jay-Z's Bel Air house.

Holmby Hills: an English village and a five-acre lawn

Arthur Letts, founder of the Broadway department store, named Holmby Hills for Holdenby, the English village where he was born, and his family laid it out on the old Wolfskill Ranch. That is how Daren Metropoulos's company told it in 2016, when he bought the Playboy Mansion. Letts died in 1923, and his son-in-law Harold Janss carried the plan on, with estate lots of up to four acres.

The Letts family built there too. Arthur Letts Jr.'s Elizabethan revival house went up in 1927, designed by Joseph Estep and Arthur Rolland Kelly, according to the Pacific Coast Architecture Database; Louis Statham owned it after World War II, and Hugh Hefner bought it in 1971. Hefner sold in 2016 to Metropoulos, who already owned the 1929 house next door, once part of the same Letts estate, and Hefner stayed on until his death in September 2017. In 2018 Metropoulos signed a covenant with the city barring demolition. By May 2025, TMZ reported, a renovation of about six years was finished, the vines stripped off the walls and the old staff house replaced. The Playboy Mansion (former) carries the full ownership chain.

Here the ground outprices the house. The county roll values the Playboy Mansion's five acres at more than 12 times the building standing on them.

Spelling Manor, also in Holmby Hills, replaced an older estate. Los Angeles architecture historian Steve Vaught, writing on his Paradise Leased blog, traces the site to a 1932 house by Gordon Kaufmann for businessman Malcolm McNaghten. Bing Crosby's family took it over in a hurry in 1943, after a Christmas tree fire destroyed their Toluca Lake house, and kept it until 1964. Aaron and Candy Spelling bought in 1983. The county created the manor's single parcel in July 1988 by joining three lots, and its roll dates the finished house to 1990. Candy sold it in 2011 to Petra Ecclestone, and its 2019 resale set the record for the highest price paid for a California home, per Fox News. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, bought it in 2025, and Robb Report says they bought it mainly to host meetings and events for nonprofit and cultural institutions. Spelling Manor (former) has the parcel history.

Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo lasted six months in the neighborhood. They bought a 1960s French Regency house in Holmby Hills in August 2017, stripped it to the studs, and sold it in February 2018 for what they had paid, the remodel half done, according to Cottages & Gardens. That house is not on our map. The one of theirs that is sits farther west.

The Riviera: a ranch house in Pacific Palisades

The county assessor files the Levine house under its Santa Monica Canyon and Riviera cluster, in Pacific Palisades. The country club the neighborhood shares a name with opened in 1927, and the PGA Tour's centennial history has Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Walt Disney on the course that first summer.

Architectural Digest credits the one-story ranch house to Cliff May and dates its design to the 1930s; the county roll gives 1940. Producer Brian Grazer owned it before Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner bought it in 2009 and renovated it heavily. EOnline.com reported in January 2019 that Levine had bought it from them; our own legacy record dated the purchase to April 2018. On Architectural Digest's 2021 tour Levine said, “We didn't want a palatial McMansion,” and that Beverly Hills had started to feel hectic. The couple sold in May 2022 and moved up the coast to Montecito, and the county roll logged that change of ownership the same year. The Riviera house is Adam Levine's house (former) on our map.

Next door in Brentwood, Dr. Dre lives behind a guard gate in the chateau Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen built, and his page tells that one.

The Malibu Colony: a Lautner house on the sand

May Rindge began leasing this strip of beach in 1926 to cover the legal bills from her long fight to keep the public off her ranch. Tenants paid $30 a month on 10-year leases for 30-foot lots, according to Topanga New Times. Our Hollywood stars' homes map tells the Rindge story in full.

Edward Norton bought his Colony house in 2017, and it is the architecture that makes it worth a stop on the map. John Lautner finished it in 1968, per the Pacific Coast Architecture Database; the county roll says 1967. The front is two concrete curves, each shaped like half of a hanging chain, turned in opposite directions so they read as breaking waves. The house was nominated to the National Register of Historic Places in 2009, and a 2014 City of Malibu report found only two National Register buildings in its study area: this one and the tiled 1929 Adamson House, built for Rindge's daughter.

The county's written description of the lot, the legal description that fixes its boundaries on paper, still begins with the “Land of Matthew Keller in the Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit.” Keller won his claim to the rancho in federal court in 1864, and his son Henry sold it in 1892 to Frederick Rindge for $10 an acre, according to Pepperdine University's Malibu history guide. The Norton house is Edward Norton's Malibu house.

Elsewhere in Malibu, Caitlyn Jenner's hilltop is on our map of where the Kardashians live.

Laughlin Park: DeMille's hill in Los Feliz

Homer Laughlin bought the knoll in 1890, and from 1902 he planted 50,000 trees, shrubs, and other plants and graded carriage roads across it, according to the Los Feliz Improvement Association. He died in January 1913, and his company filed the subdivision with the city that year: 40 lots planned, 77 today, inside a gated community.

Cecil B. DeMille bought lumber baron Charles F. Perry's mansion there in 1916. Four years later he added the house next door, briefly leased by Charlie Chaplin, and the city named the street for him in 1926. He lived on the joined grounds until his death in 1959, according to L.A. Street Names, which also records that his granddaughter Cecilia sold the estate in 1988 and that the Chaplin side was split off and sold in 1999. The county's parcel history agrees on the split: the old parcel was retired and the Chaplin side given its own on the same day in May 1999.

The owners before Angelina Jolie spent six years restoring the house with the architects Tichenor & Thorp, and she bought it in 2017, the last change of ownership the county roll records. TMZ credits the original 1913 design to architect B. Cooper Corbett; the roll dates the building to 1920. In May 2026 Jolie put the estate up for sale at $29.85M, TMZ reported, and as of September 2026 we have found no report of a sale. Angelina Jolie's Los Feliz house has the parcel history.

Beverly Hills and the Hollywood Hills

The Beverly Hills flats, Trousdale Estates, and the canyons that share the 90210 ZIP code have their own guide, the Beverly Hills celebrity homes map, with 18 homes sorted by which side of the city line they sit on. The Hollywood Hills, the Sunset Strip, and the history of the paper star map are in our Hollywood stars' homes map.

Seeing the houses

Starline Tours runs the bus most visitors picture: two hours from the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, along Mulholland Drive and the Sunset Strip and through Beverly Hills, the Hollywood Hills, and Bel Air. The company says it created the tour in 1935. In September 2026 its page showed a $49 adult fare marked down to $39, with a line worth reading before you book: “in respect of owners' privacy, celebrity homes visited vary.”

Two of the neighborhoods on this page sit behind gates. Laughlin Park is a gated community, per the Los Feliz Improvement Association, and the Malibu Colony has had guards on its road since the 1920s, as our Hollywood stars' page tells it.

The paper maps sold along Sunset have a long record of sending people to the wrong gate, as the Hollywood stars' page explains. Open the Los Angeles map instead and work the neighborhoods pin by pin, and read how we handle celebrity addresses before you go.