(Photo by Gilbert Flores/WWD via Getty Images)
The late Diane Keaton’s Los Angeles, California, house has hit the market for $27 million. The storied superstar actress, who died in October, herself renovated the Sullivan Canyon property (found at 13215 Riviera Ranch Road in LA), and it was far from the only house she made over like that.
While Keaton is and will be most remembered for her career as an Oscar-winning actress, throughout her life she followed a second vocation: real estate, specifically flipping houses. Although most part-time agents probably don’t claim the kind of primary career success Keaton had, her dedication and appreciation for real estate is proof that the industry both requires and inspires passionate practitioners.
In her 2014 memoir “Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty,” she recounted that she had rented, bought or sold “close to fifty” houses or apartments in her lifetime. Keaton’s father once worked as a real estate broker and did “quite well” in it, Keaton said in her 2011 memoir “Then Again.” As a child living in California, she often visited model homes with him. In “Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty,” she wrote how she “blamed” her father for “my inability to commit to (a) home”—“As with all addicts, I found that each house felt short.”
After she moved back to Los Angeles in the 1980s, Keaton cultivated her “life of buying, selling and living in a series of houses.” Describing her philosophy of house-flipping in “Pretty,” she stated that: “Working on a renovation is honoring the past by including it in the future.”
Speaking of embracing the future, in her later life, Keaton happily embraced social network Pinterest as a resource for renovation tips and exhibition. She cultivated several photo catalogues showing off houses, interiors, exteriors and architectural design on her Pinterest account. She even wrote a book documenting her renovation of the aforementioned five-bedroom Sullivan Canyon area estate in 2017, titled “The House That Pinterest Built.” Keaton settled in that property for several years—she listed it for $29 million in early 2025, but ultimately delisted it shortly before her passing.
Keaton had an affinity for Spanish Colonial houses and many of the houses she renovated in California were built in that style. Speaking to Architectural Digest in 1999 about a house in that style (built in 1926) which she’d renovated, Keaton cited the architectural style’s roots in California state history as the reason for her love of it.
Her first “dream home” was a New York apartment above Central Park, purchased after her starring in “Annie Hall.” Recently listed in 2018, the apartment offers a 360-degree view of the city. Upon her return to LA in the ‘80s, Keaton went to work flipping houses across the American Southwest, predominately in California but not exclusively.
In 2018, Keaton purchased a desert retreat home in Tucson, Arizona’s Barrio Viejo neighborhood for $1.5 million. After making her renovation, she listed the home in 2020 and ultimately sold it for $2.2 million. Some of the homes Keaton renovated attracted other celebrities as well.
In about 2000, Keaton sold a five-bedroom Beverly Hills home she’d refurbished to Madonna (who herself listed it in 2004). Speaking to the New York Times shortly after Keaton’s passing this October, Santa Monica-based Compass agent Frank Langen pointed to a “Diane Keaton” effect where her involvement could raise a property’s value by 30%; Langen characterized Keaton as someone always ahead on matters of style, including in architecture and houses.
House flipping may or may not be the kind of hobby you need celebrity level money to do, but you definitely need passion to stick with it and be as hands-on as Keaton was. Keaton’s legacy of remodeled homes and their bills of sale are proof she had both.
