Nashville Tours of Stars Homes: The DIY Driving Route

Nashville keeps its famous front doors behind trees, and any honest self-guided version of a stars homes tour has to open with that. On most of this route you are looking at a gate, a gravel drive, and a treeline. The houses are real and the addresses are real. You still will not see much of them from the road.

That is not an argument against the drive. It is an argument for driving it for the right reason. The loop below crosses 2 counties and 3 different kinds of money:

Her second home is in a wooded satellite city that incorporated so it could write its own zoning, and a stretch of Williamson County where the biggest country acts of the last 25 years bought whole farms whose boundaries were drawn by antebellum planters. The land carries the story the driveways will not.

What the paid bus buys you

Gray Line Tennessee runs the tour most visitors mean when they say this. Its own page sets the terms: 2 hours, a mini-bus, over 30 celebrity homes, departing from Riverfront Station downtown, with Taylor Swift, Sheryl Crow, Martina McBride, Dierks Bentley, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette among the names on the sheet.

Two hours out of downtown and back is the whole constraint, and it is the reason to do this yourself. That window covers Belle Meade, Green Hills, and Forest Hills without strain. It does not stretch to Franklin, and it does not come close to Leiper's Fork, where half the homes on this route sit. Budget most of a day in your own car and you get both halves, in an order that makes sense to a driver rather than to a dispatcher.

Start in Midtown, at the one address with a street presence

Begin where the drive is easiest and the sightline is honest. The Adelicia stands 18 stories over Midtown, with brownstone-style townhouses at the sidewalk and the penthouses stacked on the top 2 floors. Corner Realty Partners developed it and Brasfield & Gorrie built it, which makes it the only stop on this list you can stand in front of without standing in front of somebody's yard.

Taylor Swift bought a penthouse here in 2009, at 20, the first home she paid for with her own money. She took over what had been an ultramodern bachelor pad, spent 18 months redoing it, and ended up with a koi pond under a wrought-metal spiral staircase and a human-sized birdcage she had sketched herself. “It's what the inside of my brain looks like,” she told Rolling Stone in 2012, in a room where a framed photo of the 2009 VMA interruption hangs over the fireplace.

The geography here is the point. Music Row began a few blocks east of this tower, in the Quonset Hut studio Owen and Harold Bradley opened in 1954, with RCA adding Studio B in 1957. Everything else on this drive is downstream of those 2 rooms. If you want coffee and a half hour on foot before you get in the car, The Gulch is immediately north and Pancake Pantry is a short run south in Hillsboro Village, on your way anyway.

South through Green Hills into Forest Hills

Take Hillsboro Pike south. You will pass Green Hills Mall and, in a strip center that looks like nothing at all, The Bluebird Cafe, which is where a working songwriter town auditions itself. Keep going and the lots get bigger, the shoulders disappear, and you are in Forest Hills.

Forest Hills is worth understanding because it explains everything you are about to fail to see. It is its own city, incorporated in 1957, with roughly 5,038 residents and a staff of 3. Its residents formed it to control their own zoning and to resist annexation, and when Nashville and Davidson County merged their governments in 1963 it kept its charter and stayed separate. Large wooded lots on steep ground were the whole design goal. Nearly 70 years later that design is the reason a country star can live a few miles from Music Row and be invisible from the street.

The city is bracketed by 2 parks, and both are better stops than any gate. Radnor Lake was not built for hikers: the Louisville and Nashville Railroad impounded Otter Creek around 1910 to make a reservoir, and by 1919 a million gallons a day were running downhill to service steam engines at Radnor Yard. The Tennessee Ornithological Society petitioned the railroad in 1926 to protect it as a wildlife preserve, the state bought 747 acres in August 1973, and the 85-acre lake now sits inside a park of about 1,100 acres. Percy Warner Park closes the other side.

Tim McGraw and Faith Hill did not buy a house in Forest Hills. They bought 17 undeveloped acres in 2004 and built one, which is why there is no prior owner and no renovation history to chase:

The record it did generate is a water record. After the May 2010 Nashville flood, neighbors Ernest and Jennifer Gendron sued the trust that holds the property in Davidson County Chancery Court, arguing that fallen trees and shifted soil kept draining onto their downhill land. The trust's attorney, Bill Ramsey, put the defense plainly: “when you have a flood, funny things happen with land.”

Taylor Swift's second Nashville address is in the same city, and it has a name older than she is. The estate is called Northumberland. It belonged to Guilford Dudley Jr., the insurance executive behind the L&C Tower downtown, and his widow, Jane, sold it to Luke Lewis, the executive who ran Universal Music's Nashville labels. The county assessor dates the main house to 1964 and records it as a one-story frame house on about 5.7 acres inside the Forest Hills tax district, and Swift's deed on it dates to June 2011. From the road it is a wall, which is the point of it.

West to Highway 100, and the closure that changes this drive

Cut west on Old Hickory Boulevard until it meets Highway 100. This is the transition leg, and it has the best food on the route. The Loveless Cafe started in 1951, when Lon and Annie Loveless began selling fried chicken and biscuits to travelers on Highway 100 back when it was the main road between Nashville and Memphis. They converted their 4-room house into a restaurant and put a 14-room motel behind it.

Highway 100 is also where the Natchez Trace Parkway ends, and this is the part of the drive that has changed. The National Park Service closed the parkway between mileposts 437 and 440 in April 2026 to replace a temporary pedestrian barrier on the Double Arch Bridge with a permanent one and to repaint the span. It is shut to cars, cyclists, and walkers alike, and the Park Service has it running to May 2027. Southbound, the posted detour leaves the parkway onto Highway 100 heading west for 3.5 miles, turns onto Highway 96 heading east for 3.5 miles, and rejoins at the ramp. Day visitors can still run the northern terminus down to Big Tree Overlook and back.

So the classic version of this leg, terminus to Leiper's Fork in one unbroken 16-mile glide, is off the table for now. You can still take the Trace south, but you come off it and back on partway down, and you want to know that before you are sitting at a barricade with a car full of people.

Leiper's Fork and the Williamson County farm belt

Leiper's Fork sits a mile east of the parkway at milepost 428: about 650 people, roughly 1,100 acres, and one main street, which is Old Hillsboro Road. It has been a National Register historic district since 1988. It was settled in the late 1700s by North Carolina and Virginia families holding Revolutionary War land grants, one of which, Lieutenant Jesse Steed's 2,560 acres, covered the site of the village itself, and it grew because traffic on the old Natchez Trace had to pass through.

Here is the thing the celebrity coverage almost never says out loud. The farms on this route are not big because country music made a lot of money. They are big because the parcels were already that size. Samuel Morton had built one of the area's largest farms by 1859, more than 1,000 acres. Beechwood Hall, the 1856 house standing on ground that later fell inside the same holding, anchored one of the 3 largest antebellum plantations in Williamson County, also over 1,000 acres. When Nashville money came back out here in the 2000s it bought those outlines whole rather than subdividing them, which is why the modern numbers read 150 acres, 400 acres, 620 acres. You are driving property lines drawn before the Civil War.

Carrie Underwood and Mike Fisher are the clearest illustration of it. They bought 354 raw acres in the foothills in 2011, lived in a barn on the property while the house went up, and later added 50 more to round the place out to roughly 400. Fisher was traded from the Ottawa Senators to the Nashville Predators the same year, specifically so he could live where his wife lived. The estate has produced exactly one piece of public drama since: in June 2024 a UTV parked by the garage caught fire at night and all 8 of Williamson County's fire stations responded before it was out. The main house was untouched.

Luke Bryan moved out from Brentwood in 2012 onto 150 acres he named Red Bird Farm, for his older sister Kelly, who died in 2007. He hired Nashville designer Chad James with a single brief: make it feel like Blackberry Farm, the East Tennessee resort where James had spent childhood Thanksgivings. The guesthouse went up first so the family could live on site through roughly 2 years of construction, and a path runs from the screened porch down to a catfish pond. In July 2017 his wife, Caroline, announced Brett's Barn, named for her niece Brett Boyer, who died at 7 months old earlier that year, with a white pony called Kilo standing in for a promise Caroline had made her. The barn now shelters more than 20 rescued animals, llamas and kangaroos included, and its event proceeds fund congenital heart disease research through the Brett Boyer Foundation.

If you want the version of Bryan you can walk into, that is his 32 Bridge bar on Broadway downtown, named for the Route 32 bridge over the Flint River back in Georgia.

The last farm on this leg is the one you should treat most carefully. McGraw and Hill assembled their Franklin place from 2 adjoining parcels in November 2001, ground that already held at least 6 houses, 4 of them livable. One was a farmhouse built around 1850 in the Greek Revival style, with a 2-story portico on 2 sides of the building, a design only one other farmhouse in the area shares. Its chain of title runs Samuel Morton, then the Bailey family in the 1880s, then George Lillie in 1902. The couple sold the whole 620-acre spread to a Nashville investment group in June 2021, after 20 years. The buyers split the old farmhouse onto its own 135 acres and sold it again in February 2022.

Finish in downtown Franklin

Come back east into Franklin and park. The downtown is 16 blocks on the National Register, laid out from 1799, with one of the denser concentrations of Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate, and Victorian building stock in Tennessee, and the National Main Street Center gave it a Great American Main Street award in 1995 for the restoration work. Downtown Franklin is where the drive stops feeling like a survey of other people's driveways and starts feeling like a place. If you have daylight left, Arrington Vineyards is east of town. If you would rather have the whole thing sequenced with pins already dropped, our Modern Country Franklin and Brentwood tour covers this half of the map.

What the drive is honestly worth

Set your expectations at the right level and this is one of the better days out in Middle Tennessee. Of the 6 homes above, exactly one reads from the street, and it is a condo tower. The other 5 are treelines, walls, and long private drives, and that is by design in both counties: Forest Hills zoned for it deliberately, and Williamson County inherited it from farming. What you get instead is the shape of the money, which turns out to be the more interesting thing.

If you want the wider version of who lives where before you plan a route, our roundup of celebrity homes in Nashville runs 27 homes across the same ground, and our piece on celebrity addresses explains why the exact street numbers stay behind the ropes on every one of them.