Hollywood Stars Homes Map: Where the Stars Live

Where do Hollywood stars live? Mostly not in Hollywood. Hollywood is a neighborhood inside the City of Los Angeles, not a city of its own. It incorporated as a town in 1903 and gave the charter up in February 1910 to get onto the Los Angeles water and sewer systems, the studios arrived the next year, and after World War II the studios and the people who ran them left again for Burbank, Culver City, and the Westside. Today Paramount is the only one of the old major studios still working inside Hollywood proper. The Walk of Fame stayed. The houses you are picturing are in Beverly Hills, in the hills above it, in Bel Air and Holmby Hills, along Mulholland Drive, and out on the sand in Malibu.

That is a lot of ground to cover with a folded paper map bought from a lawn chair on Sunset Boulevard. The map has a good story, which we tell below, and a long record of sending people to the wrong front door. The bus tours run about two hours and cost around $50 a seat, and the largest operator's own website says the homes it passes vary.

We built the Velvet Ropes map of Los Angeles to answer the question the paper map could not. Each celebrity home on it is a pin with a short story of who lived there and when, the county record where we have pulled one, and a photograph where we have one. The exact street address is the one thing we hold back. It is a real person's front door, and revealing it is the paid step, which is what keeps the rest of the map free. The neighborhood, the story, and the history cost nothing.

If you are standing on Hollywood Boulevard with a phone, this is the short version, and the map covers all six.

• Beverly Hills, the flats south of Sunset: the wide grid streets, the houses you can see from the sidewalk.
• Beverly Hills, north of Sunset: the canyon estates inside the city line, and the streets the bus tours run.
• Beverly Hills Post Office, 90210: the hills up to Mulholland that carry the mailing address and sit inside Los Angeles.
• Bel Air and Holmby Hills: the two Los Angeles neighborhoods west of the city that share its money.
• The Hollywood Hills: the canyons above the boulevard, the closest thing to a star living "in Hollywood."
• Malibu: the beach houses, most of them weekend places.

Beverly Hills, CA 90210, that is not in Beverly Hills

Beverly Hills is a separate city, and it is separate because movie stars wanted it that way. Douglas Fairbanks bought a lodge above the young town in 1919 and had it rebuilt for Mary Pickford, the film colony followed the two of them up the hill, and in 1923, when Los Angeles tried to annex the city, Pickford led the campaign against it. Residents voted 507 to 337 to stay independent. Sunset Boulevard is the line that matters inside the city: south of it are the flats, where the streets run in a grid and the lots are city-sized, and north of it the streets climb into the canyons and the lots turn into estates.

Drive north of Sunset far enough and you leave the city without seeing a sign. The hills above Beverly Hills, up to Mulholland Drive, take in Benedict Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, and Beverly Crest, and all of it is City of Los Angeles. The Beverly Hills post office delivers the mail, so the addresses read Beverly Hills, CA 90210, and the area is known by that fact: the Beverly Hills Post Office, or BHPO. Its residents get the Los Angeles police, the Los Angeles fire department, and the Los Angeles schools.

For a visitor, the practical point is that a great many of the "Beverly Hills mansions" on a star map or a bus route are in Los Angeles, and the address on the map will say otherwise. We checked this against our own pins. Of the 15 Los Angeles-area homes on our Beverly Hills celebrity homes map, nine carry a Beverly Hills mailing address and sit on lots the county assessor files under Los Angeles zoning; six are inside the city. On our map the pin sits where the house sits, and the locality line tells you which side of the city limit it is on.

Bel Air and Holmby Hills, west of the city, are Los Angeles too, and so are the Hollywood Hills, the canyons that run from the boulevard up over the ridge toward Studio City and hold the Hollywood Sign, the Bowl, and Laurel Canyon. When someone says a star lives "in Hollywood," the Hollywood Hills is usually the place they mean.

Malibu and the Colony

Malibu was one family's ranch for longer than it has been a town. Frederick Hastings Rindge bought the Rancho Malibu in 1892, and after he died in 1905 his widow, May Knight Rindge, spent the rest of her life trying to keep the public out of it, fighting the railroad, the county, and the state in court until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against her in 1923. The coast highway opened through Malibu in June 1929, and the isolation ended.

The Colony was her answer to the legal bills. In 1926, with the highway coming, she began leasing beachfront lots on a strand west of Malibu Creek to movie people. Gloria Swanson took three lots, Pickford and Fairbanks took ten, and by 1928 the strand was wall to wall with houses, while guards on the private road turned away anyone who came to look. As the leases expired, many of the tenants bought their lots outright, which is how the Malibu Colony became the guard-gated street it still is. The houses were weekend places from the start, a short drive up the coast from the studios, and most of them still are.

The paper map, and what it gets wrong

The map to the stars' homes is almost as old as the stars. A Los Angeles newspaper described one in 1924 showing the homes of 65 stars across Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills, and the studios printed their own, with directions, because a fan at the gate was good publicity. A 1926 map was a real estate promotion: buy a lot near a star. A "Hollywood Starland" map from 1937, now in the Library of Congress, called itself a moviegraph and showed the stars at golf, polo, and beach volleyball, but named neighborhoods and left off the streets. It was sold as a souvenir, and it never pretended to be a guide.

The map sold on Sunset Boulevard today comes from that era. The Welton family's version traces to a 1930s guide called Starland Estates and Mansions, and Linda Welton has sold it from a corner of Sunset for decades, at $25 a copy as of 2019. In 2011 the owners of the house where Michael Jackson died took her to court over her stand outside it.

The trouble with the maps is that nobody checks them. In 2019 The Hollywood Reporter checked the addresses given for 93 stars against three competing maps and found the maps disagreed on 51 of them. The map has always been half souvenir and half rumor.

The bus tours

The bus is the other way people have always done this. Starline Tours runs a two-hour open-air tour from the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard along Mulholland Drive, the Sunset Strip, and the streets north of Sunset in Beverly Hills, from about $50 an adult. Its own website says the homes visited vary in respect of the owners' privacy, and that is fair warning. Most of what you see from the van is a hedge and a gate.

The TMZ tour is a different product. Resellers list it at about $59, it runs two hours from the TCL Chinese Theatre courtyard through Hollywood, the Sunset Strip, and Beverly Hills, and it is built around the restaurants, shops, and clubs where the site's stories happened. It is a hotspot tour with games and a guide doing gossip.

What the digital map does instead

Open the Los Angeles map and you get the neighborhoods the bus routes run through and the ones they skip, from the Post Office hills to Malibu, as pins you can work at your own pace. Tap a pin and you get the story of the house, the years the person lived there, and the record where we have pulled one. You choose the route and the order, on foot or in your own car, and you skip the parts you do not care about.

The exact addresses stay behind the ropes. We do not publish a street number on any home profile or in any article, including this one, because these are private residences and a person lives there. Revealing an address is a paid step on the profile itself, and that step pays for the research behind the pins. How we think about that is set out in how we handle celebrity addresses.

The Los Angeles guides page is where our driving routes for these neighborhoods will land, and as of September 2026 they are still being built. The Nashville guides show the shape: a driving route with turn-by-turn stops, in an order that makes sense on the ground, so a Beverly Hills morning or a Malibu afternoon will come with a plan instead of a pile of pins. The wider index of every home we have mapped lives at celebrity homes.

Questions people ask

Do any stars live in Hollywood?

Some do, mostly in the Hollywood Hills, which is a separate neighborhood on the slopes above Hollywood Boulevard. The flat part of Hollywood is where the studios and the theaters were, and the industry moved most of its money to Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the beach decades ago.

Are the star maps accurate?

Not reliably. A 2019 comparison of three competing maps found they disagreed on the addresses of 51 of 93 stars, and the 1937 map in the Library of Congress did not give streets at all. Treat a paper map as a souvenir.

Is Beverly Hills part of Los Angeles?

No. It has been its own city since 1914 and voted against joining Los Angeles in 1923. The hills north of it with a Beverly Hills mailing address, the 90210 area called Beverly Hills Post Office, are Los Angeles.

Can you see the houses in Malibu Colony?

Not from the street. The Colony has been guarded since the 1920s, and today it sits behind a 24-hour guard gate.