At her core, Angelina Jolie is just like any other mother trying to give her children the best life she can. The newly single mother of six—Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, Vivienne and Knox—gave Vanity Fair a glimpse of her family’s new home life in the Cecil B. DeMille estate. In the cover story, Vanity Fair describes the 11,000-square-foot mansion which Jolie recently purchased as sitting on “rolling lawns” with “lush trees at the perimeter” behind its swinging gates. Past the fountains and swimming pool, a number of open doors and windows added to the breeziness of the Los Feliz home’s interiors.
Jolie and her brood had moved in just four days prior, and already the home, which had been listed for just under $25 million, was decorated with creamy-white furnishings and candles. The actress admitted to not really knowing her way around the place yet and claimed the décor was sparse, with just one black-and-white photo of the children and all their pets on display throughout the home.
After the family spent nine months in a rental and living out of suitcases, it wasn’t the property’s esteemed history that attracted Jolie to the home; rather, Jolie said, she chose it for its six bedrooms, ten bathrooms, immediate availability, and extreme privacy. Regardless, the house is spectacular, with a kitchen Vanity Fair described as “worthy of a Nancy Meyers movie,” a grand staircase landing punctuated by a bouquet of white flowers sitting on a round table, a gray library (Jolie’s favorite room) made complete with a ladder scaling the walls, and a creamy-white living room with sofas covered by oversize throw pillows. She admits that homemaking is fairly new to her, saying, “I didn’t even know I needed ‘throw pillows,’” as decorating “was always Brad’s thing.”
Adding to the normalcy of her home life, family members file in and out of the interview, a level of privacy many moms might relate to, with Zahara popping downstairs to pet the dog and Vivienne coming home from a sleepover. At another point, her Rottweiler, Dusty, jumped onto the sofa after a quick swim in the pool, creating a visual metaphor for her “messy, relaxed, normal” home life. Taking a break from Hollywood, Jolie wants to focus on making her house a home, referring to making “proper breakfast” as a passion, with one notable request from her children, to which she happily obliged: that she take cooking classes. “As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‘Did I do a great job as a mom or was that an average day?’” she admits.
Broadening the feeling of family, Jolie has also welcomed her once estranged father, actor Jon Voigt, back into her family's lives, as long as he follows this rule: “Don’t make them play with you. Just be a cool grandpa who’s creative, and hang out and tell stories and read a book in the library.”
Jolie recognizes that while she's been working on her domestic lifestyle for quite sometime, it may come to an end—at least for a bit—quite soon: “I’ve been trying for nine months to be really good at just being a homemaker and picking up dog poop and cleaning dishes and reading bedtime stories. And I’m getting better at all three. But now I need to get my boots on and go hang, take a trip.” Quoting her youngest son, Knox, to explain the wanderlust, Jolie added, “He said, ‘Who wants to be normal? We’re not normal. Let’s never be normal.’ Thank you—yes! We’re not normal. Let’s embrace being not normal!”
