Dr. Dre's House: From Compton to a Brentwood Chateau

Dr. Dre lives in Brentwood, on the west side of Los Angeles, in a guard-gated enclave on a ridge above lower Mandeville Canyon. His house there is a limestone French chateau that Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen built for themselves and then sold to him in 2014. The county's property roll has recorded no change of ownership since, so as of September 2026 it is still his.

It is a long way from where he started. Andre Young was born in Compton in February 1965, and his family moved often: apartments and houses in Compton, Carson, Long Beach, Watts, and South Central. By his own account he was mostly raised by his grandmother in the New Wilmington Arms, a housing project in Compton. The trip from those streets to a ridge above the Westside runs across the whole Los Angeles basin, from the flat grid south of downtown to the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains.

The Brentwood house is the one this page is mostly about, and its precise address is the part we keep behind the ropes. For the parcel, the property record, and the map pin, see Dr. Dre's Brentwood home profile on Velvet Ropes.

Compton, where the story starts

Compton is older than most of the Los Angeles suburbs around it. It incorporated in 1888, named for Griffith Dickenson Compton, who had led a party of settlers there two decades earlier. It was not always the city it became famous as: in 1950 its population was more than nine tenths white. That changed after the Supreme Court's 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer stopped courts from enforcing racial covenants, the clauses in old deeds that barred Black buyers. Through the 1950s, middle-class Black families moved in, mostly on the west side, and Compton became a sought-after suburb for the Black middle class of Los Angeles.

Dre was born in 1965, the year of the Watts riots, and white flight from Compton sped up afterward. The city later became notorious for gang violence between the Bloods and the Crips, and it reached Dre early. He started at Vanguard Junior High in 1976 and transferred to Roosevelt Junior High, a safer school, because of the gang violence. In the late 1980s N.W.A put the city's name on a record, Straight Outta Compton, and the name has belonged to rap ever since.

Our 2018 version of this page printed the street number of one of the Compton houses Dre grew up in. Other people live there now. This version leaves it out, and it will stay out.

Brentwood Country Estates

The enclave where Dre lives is called Brentwood Country Estates. It sits high on the western edge of Brentwood, the district that runs from Wilshire Boulevard up to Mulholland Drive at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. Mandeville Canyon, below it, runs about three miles north and is the longest dead-end street in the City of Los Angeles.

A community guide from a Brentwood agent describes the enclave as 13 estates spread over 250 acres, around 1,000 feet above sea level and facing the coast, with a 24-hour guarded gate, and dates the houses inside to between 1996 and 2011. Arnold Schwarzenegger has owned there, and so did Brady and Bündchen.

The county's own record agrees on the timing. The Los Angeles County assessor created this parcel on May 5, 1992, as lot three of the tract that laid out the enclave. A tract, in county terms, is the map a developer files to cut a big piece of land into house lots, so 1992 is when this piece of the ridge first became a lot of its own. The assessor's card dates the finished house to 2011, the last year in the guide's range, and codes its view as water, city, and canyon.

The house Brady and Bündchen built

Brady, then the New England Patriots' quarterback, and Bündchen bought the four-acre lot in 2008. Construction ran from 2009 to 2011. The architect was Richard Landry of Landry Design Group, a Los Angeles firm, and the interiors were by Joan Behnke and Associates, according to the Pacific Coast Architecture Database, a University of Washington archive that tracks buildings and the people who design them.

Landry drew a French Provincial chateau and clad it in limestone. The couple wanted it to be green as well as grand. Architectural Digest, in a passage the archive quotes, described reclaimed ceiling beams, salvaged tile, antique doors, composting, gray-water irrigation that reuses sink and shower water on the landscaping, and two large arrays of solar panels meant to cover all of the house's electricity. The Los Angeles Times described a moat that doubles as a koi pond, and a cobblestone motor court at the entrance.

They did not stay long.

Word that Dre was buying surfaced in May 2014, and the sale was official on June 4, 2014. That was the same spring Apple agreed to buy Beats, the headphone company Dre had co-founded with Jimmy Iovine in 2006.

What Dre changed

The county record tells part of this story on its own. Under California's Proposition 13, a property is reassessed when it changes hands or when something new is built, and the card logs the reason each time. This one shows the land reassessed in 2014 for a change in ownership, which is Dre's purchase and nothing after it. The building's value was reset that same base year for new construction. The assessor also now carries the house at an effective year of 2016, five years after it was finished, a figure assessors generally move forward when a building has been substantially updated after it was built.

In May 2018, TMZ reported on Los Angeles city paperwork for more work, and Brentwood News and FOX 11 Los Angeles both relayed it. The filings pointed to an underground expansion, which Brentwood News, relaying TMZ, summed up as “a studio, a basement or a bunker,” plus a guardhouse and retaining walls to go with the moat. FOX 11 said the permit allowed an underground addition as large as the house above it.

What got built below grade is harder to pin down. A 10,000-square-foot underground studio gets repeated widely, and our own 2018 version of this page printed it. We could not tie that figure to a source we trust, so it is not in this version.

The estate in the news

Nicole Young, Dre's wife of 24 years, filed for divorce in June 2020. The settlement was announced in December 2021, and in the division of property the Brentwood estate stayed with Dre, according to The Source; Billboard reported the settlement and its timing the same week.

In January 2021, while Dre was at Cedars-Sinai being treated for a possible brain aneurysm, a burglary crew targeted the house. ABC7 Los Angeles reported that investigators at first thought the group was after the nearby home of Kamala Harris, then the Vice President-elect. Nothing was taken.

The Calabasas years

The Brentwood chateau was not Dre's only house in Los Angeles County. In 2018 he bought a Mediterranean-style house in Calabasas, inside Mountain View Estates, a guard-gated community of about 385 homes. Builders worked that neighborhood from 1989 to 1998, and the county's card dates Dre's house to 1997, near the end of the run. The parcel itself took its final shape in June 1990, when the county merged one subdivision lot with part of another.

He sold it in January 2023, according to Billionaires.Africa and TheRichest, and the county reassessed the parcel for a change of ownership that year. Billionaires.Africa reported that he kept another house in Calabasas. The one he sold is on Dr. Dre's former Calabasas home profile.

Not his: the Malibu house

People often place Dre in Malibu. The Malibu beach house belongs to Jimmy Iovine, his Beats partner, who married there in 2016. It is Iovine's home, not a Dre property.

More Los Angeles front doors

Brentwood has held famous addresses for decades, including the estate at the center of the O.J. Simpson story. Dre's best-known protégé stayed home in Michigan instead; read about the Eminem houses, or start with the Hollywood stars' homes map.