Inside Kellie Pickler's Former Green Hills Home

Kellie Pickler finished 6th on season 5 of American Idol, the 2006 season Taylor Hicks won, and made the loss count for more than the crown: “Red High Heels” put her on country radio within the year, and a Dancing with the Stars win followed in 2013. For 14 years her home base was a Tudor-style house in Green Hills, on Nashville's south side, bought brand new in 2010 and sold in the spring of 2024 to a buyer whose name never hit the papers.

She was 4 years past Idol and 2 albums into her country career when she bought the place at the start of 2010, paying about $1.4M for a house so new that nobody had lived in it. Nashville Scene logged the deal in its Headline Homes column, one American Idol contender among the month's biggest Nashville closings.

The house has since changed hands, and its exact address stays behind the ropes either way.

A new Tudor in Green Hills

The house makes its point with heavy structure. Cedar posts measuring 10 by 10 inches run through it, a fireplace climbs the full 2 stories of the great room, a wine cellar sits below, and a screened porch looks over the terraced backyard and the pool. There is a laundry room on every floor, the kind of decision a builder makes for a family planning to stay, not for a quick resale.

Green Hills itself is one of the quieter ways to be well known in Nashville. The district sits a few miles south of downtown, and it keeps a steady presence in our own archive of the city's notable addresses, country singers and a Titans running back among them.

The Jacobs years

In January 2011 Pickler married Kyle Jacobs, a Nashville songwriter whose credits included Garth Brooks's “More Than a Memory.” The Green Hills house was the couple's home for the whole of their marriage, through Pickler's Dancing with the Stars season in 2013 and the daytime talk show Pickler & Ben, which she co-hosted from 2017.

Kyle Jacobs died at the home in February 2023. He was 49. Pickler stepped almost entirely out of public view in the months that followed. When she returned to a stage in April 2024, at the Ryman Auditorium, she sang “The Woman I Am,” a song the 2 of them had written together a decade earlier. “I'd be lying if I didn't say I was incredibly nervous right now,” she told the room before she began.

The sale

That prior November she had put the house on the market, asking $2.89M. The ask came down to $2.6M in March 2024, a contract followed in the first days of May, and the sale closed on May 15, 2024 at $2.3M. The buyer stayed anonymous, and Pickler said nothing publicly about the move. 14 years after she bought it new, the house left her story the way it entered it: without fanfare, and worth a good deal more than she paid.

More Green Hills front doors

Green Hills keeps drawing names well beyond country radio. Derrick Henry spent his Titans years behind a front door in the same neighborhood: step inside

For the wider map, our guide to celebrity homes in Nashville covers the rest of the city.