12 House Names as Iconic as Their Famous Owners
We at AD live by the notion that there are endless ways to fill a space with character. Whether that’s building your abode from the ground up or lining it with items that hold a special meaning to you, most techniques will cost you some time and money. But one somewhat overlooked method that’s free (and frankly, seems to be a bit of a lost art) is to give your dwelling a name. The practice traces back hundreds of years, though a 2020 New Yorker feature notes that the custom started to die out in Britain, where it had once been quite popular particularly for more lavish homes, around the mid-20th century. As of 2011, 1.4 million of 26 million English homes had their own names.
If there’s any subset of the population that can be trusted to keep the tradition of vanity home names alive, it’s celebrities. Read on for a roundup of some of the most iconic celebrity home names we’ve come across on the real estate and home tour beats.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images2/12Patrick Swayze’s Rancho Bizarro
The late actor’s longtime home was a Southern California equestrian ranch in the San Fernando Valley area, where Swayze and his wife Lisa Niemi shared the property with their animals. “We have built a really nice facility including a 16-stall barn, a roundyard, and two arenas,” the Dirty Dancing star said in a 1997 interview.
Photo: Courtesy of Booking.com3/12Martha Stewart’s Cantitoe Corners
The homemaker’s farm in Bedford, New York, was first settled in 1784. Located in a Westchester County hamlet, the property is known locally as Cantitoe Corners, after Cantitoe, the wife of indigenous chief Katonah who called the region home in the 1700s. The grounds span a whopping 153 acres and feature a guesthouse, a chicken coop, gardens, stables, and an outbuilding devoted solely to storing Stewart’s collection of baskets.
Photo: Bryan Firestone4/12Jeffrey Dean and Hilarie Burton Morgan’s Mischief Farm
Actors Hilarie Burton and Jeffrey Dean Morgan and their two children share a 100-acre upstate New York property with a whole slew of farm animals, including three Highland cows, a drove of miniature donkeys, chickens, eight alpaca, a couple of dogs, and a number of ducks—certainly enough to make a little bit of mischief on the farmhouse grounds. Life on the property inspired Burton Morgan to write her debut memoir, Rural Diaries: Love, Livestock, and Big Life Lessons Down on Mischief Farm, which she recently followed up with a second book, titled Grimoire Girl.
Photo: Mick Hales and Annabel White5/12Dorinda Medley’s Blue Stone Manor
AD toured the Real Housewife’s Tudor-style Massachusetts home back in 2020, but true-blue Bravo fans have long been acquainted with the Berkshires manse. A crucial setting in several narratives throughout The Real Housewives of New York City, Blue Stone Manor was the site of many a tearful argument. The home has a century worth of history outside of its reality TV fame, built in 1902 with a style that nods to the Gilded Age. Medley grew up just down the road from the dwelling and long harbored a dream to call it home: “Even as a kid I had Champagne tastes and caviar dreams,” she told AD of her personal history with the home, which traces all the way back to her grandfather and great-grandfather who laid the foundation as masons. “I would drive by with dad and say, ‘I’m gonna own this house one day,’ and he would say, ‘Of course you are, princess.’”
Photo: Ye Rin Mok6/12Heather and Terry Dubrow’s Dubrow Chateau
“I can hype this house as much as I want. It’s going to live up to that hype. It’s going to exceed that hype,” Terry Dubrow raved to AD in a 2018 home tour. The Botched plastic surgeon and his equally famous wife—Terry Dubrow, of Real Housewives of Orange County fame—called the 22,000-square-foot Orange County abode home up until October 2022, when they sold the spot for $55 million. Terry first spotted the plot of land, but it was Heather who handled the design and decor of the 40,000-square-foot Paradise Cove estate. She called the space “the first house we’ve been in that feels like our true home.”
Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images7/12Jackie Kennedy’s Lasata
Translating to “place of peace” in the the local Montaukett people’s Algonquian language, Lasata hosted a young Jacqueline Bouvier throughout summers in her childhood. A 10-year-old Jackie penned an ode to the seaside life often associated with her time at Lasata: “When I go down by the sandy shore / I can think of nothing I want more / Than to live by the blooming blue sea / As the seagulls flutter round about me / I can run about - when the tide is out / With the wind and the sand and the sea all about / And the seagulls are swirling and diving for fish / Oh-to live by the sea is my only wish.” The home’s A-list history lives on to the present day, as designer and filmmaker Tom Ford dropped $52 million on the purchase of the Arts and Crafts–style mansion this summer.
Photo: Getty Images/Getty Images for Global Citizen8/12Oprah’s The Promised Land
The entertainer and media mogul dropped $50 million on the Southern California estate in 2001. Located in the plush celebrity enclave of Montecito, which is also home to Meghan Markle and Jennifer Aniston, “The Promised Land” earned its lofty moniker by virtue of its 42-acre grounds, which feature a 23,000-square-foot Georgian-style main dwelling as well as a guesthouse larger than the average American primary residence, at 6,000 square feet. The home comes complete with a tennis court, multiple patios, as well as an enormous garden potentially deserving of its very own name. (The Garden of Eden, perhaps?)
Photo: Dan Callister/Newsmakers/Getty Images9/12Bill Gates’s Xanadu 2.0
In 1994, when asked what he does with his money to entertain himself, Gates responded “I’m building a house. It has serious functions, but entertainment is most of it.” His suburban Seattle home became known as Xanadu 2.0. A 1995 New York Times feature nods to biographers of Gates as the origin of the estate’s name: “In almost every room—and some of the outdoor spaces as well—the Gates place will be ‘a virtual Xanadu,’ in the words of Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, authors of Gates, a recent biography published by Doubleday.” At the time of the interview, the complex featured a trampoline room with 25-foot ceilings and walls of video screens, a 60-foot swimming pool, and a gym paneled with stone from a local mountain. The house, at least at one time, featured “enough software and high-tech displays to make a newlywed feel as though she were living inside a video game,” per a 2008 Fortune magazine profile of Bill’s ex-wife Melinda Gates. According to a 2021 Seattle Times story, the manse is valued at upward of $131 million.
Photo: Michel Arnaud/Getty Images10/12Diane Sawyer’s Chip Chop
Diane Sawyer’s longtime Martha’s Vineyard estate, which she recently sold for an impressive $23.9 million, comes with its own cutesy alliterative name as well as 20 acres of picturesque waterfront property. She purchased the coastal home in 1995 with her late husband, Mike Nichols. Scattered across the sprawling grounds are a 5,000-square-foot New England–style main house with rustic interiors as well as a number of other shingled buildings to accommodate guests.
Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images11/12Frank Sinatra’s Farralone, a.k.a. the Fox House, a.k.a. Byrdview
Sinatra’s midcentury-modern LA area home was known as a hub for lavish parties throughout Hollywood’s Golden Age. It’s known as “Farralone,” (and is located on Farralone Avenue) which is sometimes said to be a portmanteau of “far” and “alone” in reference to its relatively removed location from the bustle of downtown LA in Chatsworth—though it also boasts a few more monikers: the Fox House, as well as Byrdview. The William Pereira–designed home is not the only Sinatra abode that boasts its own name; Villa Maggio and Twin Palms Estate are two more of the late icon’s beloved West Coast abodes.
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images12/12Elvis Presley’s Graceland
Perhaps the most famous celebrity abode of all time, Graceland remains a hot tourist attraction years after the King’s 1977 death, when he was found unresponsive inside the manse at the age of 42. Graceland is synonymous with Presley’s legacy and continues to command a crowd of hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The icon’s granddaughter, Emmy-nominated actor Riley Keough, was named sole owner of the estate earlier this year.
