Robert De Niro's Houses: The Gardiner Farm, Montauk, and Manhattan

Robert De Niro's main house is a farm in Gardiner, New York, a Hudson Valley town in Ulster County, on 78 acres along the Wallkill River. A trust tied to him has held it since 1997. The farm sits in the town of Gardiner but inside the New Paltz school district, which is why New Paltz keeps turning up in its paperwork.

He also owns oceanfront land in Montauk, where his father, the painter Robert De Niro Sr., built a beach house in the 1950s. And for most of his adult life he was a Manhattan resident: 37 years in a West Village town house he owned, then, after a fire in 2012, a run of rentals.

The farm is still held by the same trust, according to Ulster County's parcel records. Hello magazine reported in April 2026 that De Niro is raising his youngest child there with his partner, and called the Gardiner estate his primary residence. Anyone who wants to place it on a map can start at Robert De Niro's Hudson Valley home profile, which carries the parcel record and the pin this article leaves out.

A farmhouse from 1811

The house at the center of the farm went up in 1811. Philip Hasbrouck, a farmer, merchant, and distiller, built it the year he married his cousin Esther Bevier, according to the local historian A.J. Schenkman in The Gardiner Gazette. Hasbrouck was a great-great-grandson of Abraham Hasbrouck, one of the original holders of the New Paltz patent, the colonial land grant the town grew out of. He died in 1841. Esther stayed on until her own death in 1871, and they had no children. His surviving account ledgers, one opened in 1815 and a “Brick Ledger” from 1828, are now in the archive at Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz.

The road to the house was not always a dead end. Until the 1950s a bridge carried it across the Wallkill to the far bank, so the Hasbrouck farm once sat on a through road to the river crossing. Schenkman's piece is also the one source we found that ties this particular building to its current owner by name: “Today, the Hasbrouck home is owned by actor Robert De Niro.”

The coverage of the tax fight below, from the National Legal Research Group and Hudson Valley One, calls it an 18th-century farmhouse. The local history is the only account with a builder, a year, and a reason for the year, and we go with 1811.

What the county records show

Under De Niro the farmhouse was rebuilt and one barn became a recreation building with a gym, a boxing ring, a basketball court, a swimming pool, and a small film studio, per the National Legal Research Group's summary of the court record. Hudson Valley One's inventory of the grounds adds guesthouses, offices, tennis courts, and a ski slope.

The county's own records describe a bigger holding than the press ever has. Ulster County's tax parcel layer lists nine parcels in Gardiner under one owner of record, the Riverside Trust, recorded across seven deeds and adding up to about 241 acres. Only one of them, the 78 acres around the house, carries the county's estate classification, the category New York assessors use for a large country residence. The other eight are vacant land, rural lots, and farmland. So the 78 acres everyone quotes are the house parcel alone, and the trust's land in Gardiner is roughly three times that.

Four years in court with the town

In 2010 the Riverside Trust sued Gardiner to cut its assessment, the value the town sets for taxing a property, from $6M to $4M. Hudson Valley One and the National Legal Research Group both covered the fight. At $6M the farm drew a tax bill of about $170,000 a year, and roughly $124,000 of that went to the New Paltz schools rather than to the town.

The town's appraiser argued the place was worth more, not less, at $8.98M. His point, as the legal summary puts it, was that a property like this does not compete with ordinary Ulster County houses, where the median sold for about $330,000. Its buyers would be shopping anywhere within 100 miles of Manhattan. State Supreme Court Justice Mary Work sided with the town in June 2014.

Then it ended quietly. The trust withdrew its appeal, let the $6M assessment stand, and paid the town's $129,000 in legal costs, while the town agreed not to push the value toward the $9M its expert had named, Hudson Valley One reported. De Niro's lawyer, Tom Harvey, told the paper that De Niro's instruction was short: “I want this taken care of.”

At stake, by the legal summary's arithmetic, was about $57,000 a year.

Montauk: his father's beach house

Robert De Niro Sr. studied under Hans Hofmann and spent his life painting in New York. He began coming out to Montauk in the 1950s and built a beach house there on a bluff above the ocean, east of Hither Hills State Park, according to The Southampton Press. The property is about 1.5 acres, a figure Dan's Papers and Behind the Hedges both give, and the rebuild described below left the land's size alone.

How the land passed to his son is the one point the accounts do not settle. Architectural Digest says it came to him when his father died in 1993, and The Southampton Press calls it inherited, while Behind the Hedges says De Niro has owned it since the 1980s. The property has its own page: Robert De Niro's Montauk home profile.

The 1950s house was older than the town's zoning rules and sat far closer to the ocean than a new house would be allowed. The ground drops so steeply toward the beach that it stood one story tall on the road side and two on the ocean side, above terraces braced by retaining walls, with a concrete pool added in 1969, per Behind the Hedges.

De Niro had tried to replace it once before. In 1997 East Hampton's zoning board turned down his plan for a much larger house, according to The Real Deal and Dan's Papers. Twenty years later he came back with a smaller request: take the house down and rebuild on the same footprint, slightly smaller, keeping the pool and patio. Town code wants houses on the ocean held 125 feet back, more than a third of a football field, and moving this one back would have meant cutting deep into the bluff. So the plan needed variances, formal exceptions to that rule. The board approved it on October 24, 2017, The Southampton Press reported, and The Real Deal carried the ruling the same week.

Some later coverage has the outcome backwards. Architectural Digest's 2026 roundup and a 2023 piece in TheRichest both describe the 2017 request as denied, which is what happened in 1997.

The ground answers the question. For this page we reviewed dated historical satellite imagery of the lot. In June 2018 the 1950s house is still standing. By September 2019 it is gone and the lot is down to its foundations. In April 2021 construction is under way, with a new pool being built. By June 2024 a finished replacement house stands beside a finished pool. No one has published the new house's size, and we do not know it. The only value in print is an estimate of about $8M, from that same TheRichest piece, made before the new house was done.

It is a private home at the end of a narrow drive, with no public access.

Manhattan: from owner to renter

For 37 years De Niro's Manhattan home was a four-story Italianate town house in the West Village, bought in 1975 for $190,000 and sold in 2012 for $9.5M, according to Architectural Digest.

The same year, a dryer fire damaged the Upper West Side apartment he and Grace Hightower, then his wife, had bought in 2006. While it was rebuilt, they spent two years renting a duplex penthouse in the West Village, in a 1920s loft building that had once been a maraschino cherry warehouse, per Architectural Digest and CityRealty. Our 2020 version of this page said De Niro bought that penthouse. He rented it. Its owner put it on the market in 2015 at $40M, and it sold in 2018 for $18M, CityRealty reported.

In September 2014 the couple moved again, to a full-floor rental high above Central Park at $125,000 a month, 6sqft reported. That apartment is on our map as Robert De Niro's former Manhattan home.

The fire had a coda. De Niro and Hightower later spent two hours at the firehouse thanking Engine Company 23, and brought the crew lunch from Tribeca Grill, his restaurant, as FireRescue1 reported from the New York Post.