Renée Zellweger's Houses: Her Katy Childhood Home and the Homes She Sold in Connecticut, East Hampton and Bel-Air

Renée Zellweger, who won Academy Awards for Cold Mountain and Judy, is tied to four houses we keep pages for, and none of them is hers today. No outlet we read says where she lives now. She grew up in a 1977 house in Katy, Texas (not Austin, as our old page said). She bought a 1937 house in Bel-Air in 2002 and sold it to Debra Messing the next year, bought a farmhouse in East Hampton in 2003 and sold it in 2014, and in 2004 bought a farm in Pomfret, Connecticut, whose main house dates to about 1770.

This page used to call the Pomfret farm her current home. The town's own records say otherwise, and we could not find a single outlet that reported the change of hands. The quiet 2015 sale, the 1770 house and the 1790 English barn are on Renée Zellweger's former Pomfret farm.

Pomfret, 2004 to 2015

She bought the farm, in the northeast corner of the state, in 2004 through a trust, according to the Town of Pomfret's ownership history. The sellers had owned it for five years.

When the farm went back on the market in September 2014, she pitched the town herself, in a brochure CultureMap Austin quoted: Pomfret, she wrote, is “the embodiment of the old fashioned American small town.”

The sale came the next year. The town's record shows a sale at a real price to new owners in 2015, about a tenth below what she had paid in 2004. We found no outlet that reported it, and we are not naming the buyers.

The town roll dates the main house to about 1770 and the barn to about 1790. Preservation Connecticut's statewide barn survey also puts the farm's barn at about 1790 and calls it an English barn, the oldest kind of barn in the state: one long room under a pitched roof, split into three bays, one each for animals, grain and tools.

The Bel-Air house she sold to Debra Messing

In the summer of 2002, months after her first Oscar nomination, for Bridget Jones's Diary, she sold her house in the Hollywood Hills and bought a 1937 house in Bel-Air for well under its original asking price, TV Guide reported at the time. She kept it about a year. In 2003 she sold it to Debra Messing, who lived there for a decade and sold it in early 2013, according to NBC News. Messing kept it far longer, so the house is filed under her name, as Debra Messing's former Bel-Air house.

NBC News, reporting Messing's sale, named its architect as Paul Revere Williams, and the Los Angeles County roll still dates the house to 1937. Williams was the first Black architect admitted to the American Institute of Architects, and in 2017, 37 years after his death, the institute gave him its Gold Medal, its highest honor.

The East Hampton farmhouse

She bought a shingled farmhouse in East Hampton village in 2003, and the New York Post reported, as relayed by The Southampton Press, that the title was recorded in the name of the photographer Bruce Weber, not hers. 6sqft dated the house to around 1900, from the 2014 sale description. No record we could reach gives a build year.

The house came with a story. A man who had owned it in the 1970s told the New York Post, when she bought it, that the spirit of a former owner was still there and liked to play tricks, as Dan's Papers retold it in 2014. It is a ghost story, and nobody has offered more than his word for it.

She put the house on the market in October 2014 and had a buyer within a month. The Southampton Press reported a November closing above her asking price, and the Suffolk County deed puts the price at more than twice what she had paid in 2003. You can follow the house past her years on Renée Zellweger's former East Hampton farmhouse.

Katy, where she grew up

Zellweger was born in Katy in April 1969. She graduated from Katy High School in 1987 and went on to the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2016 she came back to the school unannounced to see her old coaches, Katy Magazine reported.

The Harris Central Appraisal District dates the house to 1977, the year she turned eight. It is a private home, so our page on it stays at the level of the town. Of the four, it is where her story starts: Renée Zellweger's childhood home in Katy.