Where Does Taylor Swift Live in Rhode Island? Holiday House in Watch Hill

Taylor Swift's Rhode Island house sits on the hill above Watch Hill, a summer village in the town of Westerly, at the state's southwestern corner. It is called Holiday House, the name its first owner gave it around 1931, and Swift bought it in 2013 through a trust, paying cash, Boston.com reported. It is where she vacations, as the Associated Press once put it, and a second home in the eyes of the state, which is why a 2026 Rhode Island tax on second homes carries her name.

We first answered this question in September 2017. That version dated the house to the 1920s and wondered aloud whether Swift had swayed a court ruling on private beaches. The first was wrong and the second never held up, so this version starts over from the 1985 federal survey of the village, a 1966 state Supreme Court record, a 2025 town building permit, and the reporting of The Westerly Sun.

Her Watch Hill house has its own profile: Taylor Swift's Watch Hill home profile.

What the 1985 survey saw

When Watch Hill was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, the nomination, the federal paperwork that describes every building in a historic district, gave this house its own entry: “Holiday House, now Highwatch,” built around 1931 for Mrs. George Grant Snowden, the wife of a Philadelphia oil-company executive.

The surveyor did not pin it to one style. The entry reads it as a white clapboard house in a hybrid French Provincial and Moderne style with English Regency touches. That is the steep hipped roofline of a French country house, the stripped-down plainness of the early 1930s, and a few lattice porches borrowed from 19th-century England. The details the survey singled out are four slab-like brick chimneys, the shutters, and a single barrel-roofed dormer, a rounded window poking out of the roof.

The same document places the house on the summit of Watch Hill itself, and says the colony of Rhode Island kept a watch post on the highest knoll here in the 1740s, during King George's War. The Westerly Sun adds a wrinkle. On federal survey maps the rise under the house is Bear Hill, 56 feet above the sea, and locals still argue over which knoll held the lookout.

Rebekah Harkness and the stage on the lawn

William Hale Harkness and his wife, Rebekah, bought Holiday House in 1948, according to The Westerly Sun. He died in 1954. She stayed, and over the next two decades she turned a seaside house into a dance world. She added a B-shaped pool, expanded the house to about 40 rooms, and had Salvador Dalí among her guests. In 1958 she bought the old Watch Hill fire station and made it a practice studio for dancers. It sells resort clothes now.

In 1962 and 1963 she brought the entire Joffrey Ballet to Watch Hill for the summer, per the Online Review of Rhode Island History. In 1964 she founded a company of her own, the Harkness Ballet.

Then came the stage. Press accounts since, Boston.com's among them, say she put up a blue geodesic dome on the lawn in 1966 for the dancers and that the neighbors sued over zoning. The one court record we found is narrower, and we have read the 1966 opinion only in excerpts. Westerly issued her a permit on July 3, 1965, for a stage where her dancers could rehearse in private, to come down that September. A neighbor appealed it. By the time the state Supreme Court took up the fight, the permit had run out and the dancers had left town, so in April 1966 the court threw the appeal out as moot, meaning nothing was left to rule on. The excerpts we could read show no ruling on whether the stage should have been allowed, and they do not say whether that stage and the dome were the same thing.

The story that has followed her around Watch Hill ever since is that she answered her critics by dyeing a neighbor's cat green. Local historians repeat it. We found it in no record.

Harkness died in 1982. Swift told her story in 2020 on folklore, in “the last great american dynasty,” a song about the woman who owned this house decades before she did.

The neighbors who saved it

By the early 1970s the house was in danger of coming down. A group of residents formed Watch Hill Associates and bought the place to keep it standing, The Westerly Sun reported. They split the five acres into three lots, with the house on the middle one, and resold it under 18 covenants written into the deed, conditions that bind every later owner. Among them: portions of the house at its west and east ends had to come off.

Gurdon and Elizabeth Wattles took on those terms in 1974, renamed the house High Watch, and put more than $1M into it. On July 17, 1975, a light fixture on the outside of the house started a four-alarm fire that brought down part of the roof on the third floor. Crews came from Watch Hill, Westerly, Dunn's Corners, and Misquamicut, and they pumped seawater up from the bay onto the flames. The repairs took another year.

The hill had already survived worse. In the hurricane of 1938 the sea tore away the sand face of the bluff, cutting it back about 30 feet, almost to the foundations of the terrace. One resident quoted by the Sun remembered a grandfather setting blocks of quarried stone under the house afterward to keep it from toppling.

The Wattles family kept it until 1996. James and Marlene Benson owned it next, and the house sat empty for much of their time.

Swift's years on the hill

Swift's trust, named Harbor Land, bought the house in 2013. After Hurricane Sandy, the trust hired a Pawcatuck contractor to rebuild the seawall with 21,000 tons of flat-faced rock, laid along the hillside like puzzle pieces, according to the Sun.

In 2017 the state Supreme Court upheld a ruling that let landowners in part of Westerly fence the public off about two miles of beach, and the headlines, ours included, hung it on Swift. The Associated Press noted at the time that her house was in a different section of town.

She has opened the doors on her own terms. On October 4, 2014, a busload of fans, invited by phone and signed to nondisclosure agreements, spent an evening inside the house hearing 1989 before it came out. Swift played the album from her phone and sent at least one guest home with a bag of homemade cookies, NYLON reported in its oral history of those sessions.

The Fourth of July parties started in 2013, People reported. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds came in 2016, and their own houses are covered in our Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds article. The parties then went quiet until 2023, when Swift posted photos from the lawn with Selena Gomez and the Haim sisters.

The house is still changing. In January 2025 the town issued a permit for about $1.7M of work, The Boston Globe reported from town records: a remodeled kitchen and an addition of roughly 16 by 24 feet, built in place of a second-floor terrace on the east side.

And the state caught up with the second home. Rhode Island's governor floated a tax on million-dollar vacation houses in 2015, the press named it for Swift, and it was dropped. A version passed in 2025 and took effect on July 1, 2026, charging $2.50 for every $500 of assessed value above $1M on houses that are not their owners' main residence. The Boston Globe and Yahoo Real Estate both put her likely bill at about $136,000 a year.

Her other houses

Rhode Island is the summer house. The rest of the map runs from Tennessee to Manhattan to California.

Nashville came first. Swift bought her Nashville penthouse, in a Midtown tower, in 2009, a short walk from Music Row. The estate she added in Forest Hills in 2011 is in Taylor Swift's Nashville house.

In Beverly Hills she bought the Samuel Goldwyn Estate, the house in Taylor Swift's Beverly Hills home profile, in September 2015. Goldwyn, the G in MGM, had it built in 1934 to a design by the architect Douglas Honnold, according to the city's 1985 survey of historic buildings. At her request, the city council made it a local landmark in April 2017, by a unanimous vote.

In New York she owns the top of the Tribeca building covered in Taylor Swift's Tribeca home profile. It went up in 1882 as stores and lofts. After a fire in 1895 its main front was rebuilt in 1902, the city's landmarks database records. She bought it from the director Peter Jackson in 2014, and in October 2017 she added the 27-foot-wide townhouse next door, a separate property on the same block. No sale has followed. In September 2025, after a tip that she had let the compound go, Tribeca Citizen checked the city's finance records and found no sale at either building, and the city's deed index shows nothing on the penthouse after her 2014 purchase.

People still connect a West Village house with her, but Taylor Swift's former West Village rental was only ever leased. She took it in 2016 at about $40,000 a month while the Tribeca place was rebuilt. City records date it to 1912, when it went up as a brick stable. Between 2008 and 2011 it became a one-family house, with a third story, a pool set below the water table, and a rooftop addition that the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission approved in December 2010. The owner sold it in 2019, the year a track on her album Lover took its title from the street.

It is the Rhode Island house, though, that gave her a song about someone else.