Miley Cyrus's Houses: The Malibu House That Burned and the Franklin Farm

Ask where Miley Cyrus lives and for most of a decade the answer came in 2 parts: a turquoise house on a Malibu canyon road, and a farm on 33.5 wooded acres outside Franklin, Tennessee. Neither belongs to her now. And the Malibu half of that answer was always slightly off. The turquoise house was hers. The house that burned in the Woolsey Fire on November 9, 2018, was the one next door.

The 2 properties sat side by side in Ramirez Canyon, one of the drainages that runs down from the Santa Monica Mountains to the Malibu coast. Liam Hemsworth bought the larger one in 2014 for more than $6.8M: 7.4 acres, a driveway that crossed a creek, an updated 1950s ranch house, a recording studio, a separate writing studio, and a concrete barn. Cyrus lived there with him. In 2016 she bought the place next door in her own name for $2.5M, a small split-level contemporary painted a bold shade of turquoise, dark wood and 1970s bohemian styling inside, which the couple used as a guest house and a place to work. That is the turquoise pad the internet remembers.

The Tennessee half of the answer arrived in August 2017, when Cyrus paid $5.8M for 33.5 mostly wooded acres at the end of a private dirt lane outside Franklin. It was a homecoming purchase: she was born and raised in the same county, on her family's 500-acre farm, and left for Hollywood at 11. The farmhouse standing on the land was about 3 years old when she signed, built in 2014. The parcel, the ownership record, the land around it, and the map pin are all on Miley Cyrus's Franklin home profile.

The house that burned had a studio in it before she ever lived there

Cyrus's tie to the Ramirez Canyon estate ran back further than her tie to Hemsworth. The producer Matthew Wilder owned it then, and in 2007 she recorded Meet Miley Cyrus in the studio on the property, about 15 years before she moved into the house. She talked about the coincidence later. “That house had so much magic to it,” she said, and added the part she could not have known at 14: “I would've never known 15 years later I would be living in that house, which would eventually burn down.”

Wilder and his wife, Tamara Dunn, sold the estate to Hemsworth in 2014. Dirt's real-estate column, which tracked both transactions, connected her 2017 single “Malibu” to that stretch of coast.

Ramirez Canyon had already given up its best-known house

The canyon's most famous property has not been in private hands since 1993. That year Barbra Streisand handed her 22-acre estate there, appraised around $15M, to the state and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, intending it to become an environmental conference and study center. The conservancy dropped that plan, which angered her, and in 2011 Governor Jerry Brown proposed selling the canyon along with other state holdings to help close a budget gap. It is public parkland today, with rolling meadows, creeks, and the houses Streisand left behind.

6 hours from the freeway to the ocean

Los Angeles County commissioned an after action review of the Woolsey Fire, and it remains the clearest account of what happened to that part of Malibu. The fire started on November 8, 2018, north of Highway 101, and crews spent the night defending the highway corridor, expecting embers to cross. The dangerous crossing came at roughly 5:13 AM on November 9, well up a hillside between Liberty Canyon Road and the Palo Comado overcrossing, out of reach of the ground units and of the water-dropping helicopter, which was away refilling. The report clocks that spot fire at an acre in under a minute and several acres in under 5. From there it ran, in the review's words, “charring the core of the mountains and devastating Malibu in a little over six hours,” and reached the Pacific by noon.

Almost no engines were there to meet it. Wind and fire had dropped power poles and trees across the canyon roads, mutual aid requests went unfilled through the first 21.5 hours of the incident, and the unified command's strategy for the Malibu coast that Friday morning was life safety rather than structure defense. Before noon the entire coast had between 7 and 26 engines available, against the 100 to 200 the review says would have been needed to defend structures in a built-up area. County fire dispatch took roughly 1,800 calls for help above the normal countywide volume that day. Homeowners who wondered where the fire trucks were had read the situation correctly.

The totals: 96,949 acres, 151.5 square miles across 2 counties, 1,643 structures destroyed and 364 damaged, more than 250,000 people evacuated, 3 dead, and insured losses the county put at $3B to $5B. In Los Angeles County the fire destroyed 1,075 homes, roughly 36 percent of them inside the city of Malibu. The mountains lost a run of landmarks the same morning: Paramount Ranch's Western Town, where studios shot westerns for decades, burned down to the church and the train station, and the Morrison Ranch House in Cheeseboro Canyon, occupied since 1904, was destroyed outright.

Cyrus was in South Africa filming Black Mirror. “My house no longer stands but the memories shared with family & friends stand strong,” she wrote. She and Hemsworth gave $500,000 through her Happy Hippie Foundation to the Malibu Foundation, earmarked for emergency relief, community rebuilding, and wildfire prevention. In January 2025, with Los Angeles burning again, she posted a photograph of what had been her front porch: 4 letter-shaped cushions spelling LOVE, sitting in the ash. “I cry for my city.”

The wedding was at the farm

They married at the Franklin farm on December 23, 2018, 6 weeks after the fire. Williamson Source, the local outlet that covered it, reported that Cyrus chose the homestead she had bought 16 months earlier as the venue. Only family came: her sisters Noah and Brandi, and his brothers Luke and Chris. She marked the day online with a date and a line, “12.23.18” and “Ten years later…”

The marriage ended the following year. The properties went one by one after that.

Where each of them ended up

The turquoise house sold in 2020 for $1.7M, roughly $800,000 under what Cyrus paid for it in 2016. The buyers were Matthew Wilder and Tamara Dunn. The couple who had sold Hemsworth the estate on one side of the property line bought the house on the other side of it. Hemsworth sold the burned parcels for $3.6M, close to half his 2014 price, and never rebuilt the main house, though permits were taken out. He has since bought in Byron Bay, in Australia.

The farm outlasted them both by a few years. Cyrus sold it off market in September 2022 for $14.5M to Matthew Frauenshuh, whose company Fourteen Foods is the largest Dairy Queen franchisee in the United States. The Land Report counted it as the second-highest price paid for a home in the Nashville area that year, and a return of more than 150 percent on 5 years of ownership.

2 houses in Hidden Hills, and neither lasted long

Between Malibu and Franklin, Cyrus twice tried Hidden Hills, the gated equestrian city at the west end of the San Fernando Valley where much of the Kardashian and Jenner family clusters. In May 2015 she bought a horse ranch there on 5.5 acres, with a 10-stall barn, a chicken coop, a vegetable and citrus garden, and a small vineyard of cabernet sauvignon and merlot vines. Forbes put the price a little above $4M. She sold in early 2018, and the Los Angeles Times reported $5M.

In June 2020 she came back, buying off market for about $4.95M from Steven Baio, brother of the actor Scott Baio. That house went up in 1957 on 1.18 acres and had been redone and enlarged not long before she got it. Her mother, Tish Cyrus, took the interiors in a maximalist direction: black walls, neon, animal print. Cyrus sold it in July 2021 for $7.2M.

Both of those houses belong to the neighborhood's first decade, and the neighborhood is younger than it looks. A.E. Hanson, who had already built Rolling Hills out on the Palos Verdes peninsula, started assembling the land in 1949 with 700 acres bought from E.E. Hurlbutt, added 4 more parcels through 1950, and finished with 1,004.6 acres. His sign on Ventura Boulevard read “1000 Acres of Elbow Room” and priced full-acre lots at $4,750. He put up 2 model homes on Long Valley Road that year, and Leo Gorcey of the Dead End Kids bought the first one to sell, for $35,000. Residents voted to incorporate on September 19, 1961, by 358 to 71, to stop Los Angeles from annexing them and running Burbank Boulevard through the middle. Cyrus's 1954 ranch and her 1957 house both predate the city that surrounds them.

Where she lives now

She went back to Malibu. Coverage in 2022 and 2023 placed her in a Mediterranean-style house on 1.48 acres above the coast, bought for $7.9M. The house that burned kept surfacing in the work: “Flowers,” the single that opened 2023 and took Record of the Year at the 2024 Grammys, carries the line “Built a home and watched it burn.”

More front doors behind the ropes

Hidden Hills keeps turning up the same surnames year after year, and the map of who owns what is in where the Kardashians live. For the Tennessee side of Cyrus's map, start with celebrity homes in Nashville, or read how we handle celebrity addresses.