Meryl Streep's House: Pasadena Landmark, Connecticut Estate and the Tribeca Sale

Meryl Streep holds the record for Academy Award nominations by an actor, 21, and has won three. Two homes are tied to her today. She has never said publicly which she treats as her main home. The records show one she bought in 2017 and one she has held since 1985. The first is a single-story house in Pasadena, finished in 1959, bought in late 2017, made a city landmark two years later, and, by the county record, not sold since. The second is an estate of about 89 acres in Salisbury, in the northwest corner of Connecticut, which the town's property card has tied to her since 1985. The Tribeca apartment she bought new in 2006 is no longer hers. It sold in January 2020.

We first published this page in March 2018, when the Pasadena purchase was three months old, and updated it in 2019. Several things in it were wrong. This version checks each house against city, county, and town records, and says so where it corrects us.

We keep the Pasadena address behind the ropes. The map pin and the county's record of the house are on Meryl Streep's Pasadena house profile.

Meryl Streep's House

Pasadena, CA

The landmark record behind the 2019 designation, and what it means for the next owner.

Where does Meryl Streep live? The Smith and Williams house in Pasadena

Whitney Smith and Wayne Williams were partners for more than two decades. Architectural Record's obituary of Williams credits the firm with post-and-beam houses: a frame of thin posts and beams that carries the roof, which leaves the walls free to be glass. Their use of wood, according to the city's landmark report on this house, led the architecture writer Esther McCoy to write of a “Pasadena School.”

The house was finished in 1959, the original building permit says, and it was the firm's second house for the same clients. It sits on a wooded slope in Pasadena. It is one story and L-shaped, with a double-height living and dining wing under a gabled roof and glass walls on its east and west sides.

The studio is a small workshop attached to the house by a breezeway. Our 2018 page called it a detached office and studio. We also called it Don Gummer's studio. No record we have read says whose it is.

What changed after 2017

The sale became news in mid-December 2017. Cottages & Gardens credited Variety with breaking it, days before The Post opened, and reported that the house had not changed hands since the 1960s. Cottages & Gardens gave the price as $3.6M, and most coverage repeated it. We have not read the deed against that figure.

Our 2019 update said she had overhauled the place from the HVAC to the pool, “according to property records.” The city's file describes something more specific. A 2018 building permit covered replacing the 1959 metal-and-glass windows and doors with matching ones. In October 2018 the city approved a kitchen and interior remodel, a larger studio, and full-height glass to close in the open breezeway between the studio and the house. When city staff wrote up the house the next year, they found the exterior largely intact.

The Los Angeles County Assessor's record for the house still runs from a 2018 base year, the year the county last reset the value its property tax is figured from. In California that reset follows a sale or new construction, so the record shows no sale since.

A Pasadena landmark since 2019

In May 2019 the house's owner applied to have the city name it a landmark, a status that gives the city a say over changes to the building. The city's Historic Preservation Commission recommended the designation that August, and on October 28, 2019, the City Council approved it with no votes against and one member absent, according to the council's minutes for that night.

What designation changes is mostly the future. The city's preservation office says a landmark brings design review of exterior alterations, and the commission can turn down an application to demolish or heavily alter one. In plain terms, whoever owns the house next has to go through the city before touching the glass walls Smith and Williams drew.

The Salisbury estate, since 1985

Meryl Streep's Salisbury estate is the older home by three decades. The town's property card dates the deed to May 30, 1985, when she and Don Gummer, the sculptor she married in 1978, took title together. Since a July 2023 transfer the card has named them both as trustees, which means the estate is now held in a trust with the two of them managing it. The card records the 1985 deed without a price. Country & Town House and a 1986 Salisbury Association oral history both put it at about $1.8M.

The card counts 89.3 acres, most of it open land and 12 acres of it forest, and three buildings: a Cape Cod farmhouse from about 1900, a single-story studio from 1960, and a main house built in 1972. Around them are a boathouse from 1989, a pool, and a tennis court. Our 2018 page described a studio built for Gummer. The studio on the card went up in 1960, 25 years before the couple arrived.

The lake our old copy called 20 acres is bigger, and it was made. The National Inventory of Dams, the federal list of dams, records one completed in 1959 and a lake of about 42 acres behind it. Country & Town House gives 47. The property card notes the lake but does not measure it, so the records do not say how much of it lies within the 89.3 acres. In the 1986 oral history, a member of the family that built the lake describes it as “owned by Meryl Streep.”

In October 2023 a spokesperson said, as NBC News and LBC reported, that the two had been separated for more than six years.

The Tribeca apartment, sold in 2020

The third home is the one the record has closed: their former Tribeca apartment, which Streep and Gummer bought together. It was in a condominium building in Tribeca, bought new from the developer by a deed the city dates January 12, 2006, at a little over $10.1M.

It went on the market in August 2018 at $24.6M. Streep's statement to The Wall Street Journal at the time, which 6sqft later reprinted, began: “I have gardened under the stars on hot days, and sat by the cozy fire while the snow piled up on the terrace.” Our May 2019 update said the price had come down to $19.75M. We can no longer find that figure in any source we can open. 6sqft reported a cut to $18.25M after a change of brokers, with the apartment back on the market in August 2019.

It sold 17 months after it first went up. The city's deed records date the sale deed January 21, 2020, and record it a week later, at $15.8M, to a private company. That was 36 percent under the first asking price, by 6sqft's count, and 6sqft gave the Pasadena house, bought late in 2017, as the reason for selling.

More houses, and how we handle them

The rest of the city's front doors are in our guide to celebrity homes in Los Angeles. Why the exact street stays behind the ropes, even for a landmark, is in our note on celebrity addresses.