From 1994 until earlier this week, Brad Pitt has called an expansive estate in Los Feliz his primary Los Angeles home. Putt pieced together what became a compound from what was previously five contiguous lots that now span a total of two acres in the Hollywood Hills. Pitt combined them into one big property after making a few different real estate purchases over the years and then held onto the compound for almost 30 years. As of this writing the Pitt compound belongs to someone else. According to Dirt.com, Brad sold the property in an off-market deal $33 million. A record for Los Feliz, but about $7 million less than his original off-market asking price.
The buyer of Brad’s compound was Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty. Aileen’s grandfather J. Paul Getty was once the richest person on the planet thanks to his sprawling Getty Oil empire. And in an interesting twist, Dirt.com also revealed that Brad and Aileen actually swapped properties. Brad just paid $5.5 million for Aileen’s mansion in hills above Los Feliz.
Brad Pitt paid $1.7 million in 1994 for the largest portion of the estate. The seller in the first instance was another celebrity: Cassandra Peterson, better known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Then, over the next 15 years, he spent another $3.4 million in four additional purchases to bring it to its current sprawl, with several different structures joining the nearly 7,000-square-foot main house.
An avid architecture buff, Pitt took a hand in designing those other structures and redesigning the main house himself, so the property has also served as something of an architectural playground for him over the years. One of those structures was a residential home before Pitt turned it into a combination studio and guest house. Other features on the property include a skate park, a ballroom, a movie theater, a garage specifically for motorcycles, and a purportedly sizable Koi pond.
Below is how Brad’s now-former mansion looked from above circa 2006:
(Photo by RB/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images)
Pitt was reportedly shopping the property around for a few weeks before finding a buyer at $39 million. And evidently the main house’s somewhat spooky history didn’t dissuade whoever the buyer is from signing on. Here’s what the Mistress of the Dark once said about her time living in the house, which dates all the way back to 1910, before Pitt moved in:
“Something weird was going on. Footsteps above my head on the ceiling. Clouds of smoke forming into what looked like a human and then disappearing. A black shadow floating on the bottom of the pool that wouldn’t go away. After a priest performed an exorcism in the home and a Native American cleansed the home with sage, it seemed to all go away.”
Haunted or not, the home was evidently a fitting one for Pitt and his family as well. Before their split in 2016, this was where he lived with ex-wife Angelina Jolie and their six children.
In addition to his $5.5 million new LA mansion, Brad owns another of properties around the world. In 2000 Brad paid $4 million for a beach house in the town of Goleta, California (just north of Santa Barbara). In 2015 he paid $3.7 million for a villa on the Spanish island of Majorca. Brad also continues to own 50% of the French winery Chateau Miraval and most recently, July 2022, he paid $40 million for a clifftop mansion above the ocean in Carmel Highlands, California.