Take a look inside the California estate celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz just listed for $8.995M
Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert
- Celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz bought her California farm estate in 2019 for $7.5 million.
- She just listed the property, featuring a 7-horse barn and recording studio, for $8.995 million.
Five years after purchasing a historic property in rural California, celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz has placed her dream home back on the market.
"I had always thought of myself as a California person," she said in a statement to Business Insider. "I went to school there, at the San Francisco Art Institute. I learned to be a photographer there."
She added, "When Rolling Stone moved to New York in 1977, I didn't think that I was moving too. I didn't believe that I went to New York to stay. I thought I lived in California. But the work was in New York. Or Europe. After all those years living and working in New York and raising my children, I dreamed about returning to California."
After some years of searching, she purchased an estate in Bolinas, California, for $7.5 million in 2019, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal. This month, she listed the property for sale, asking $8.995.
Take a look inside the property that captured this famous photographer's eye.
The estate, nicknamed The Hideaway, is nestled on 65 acres with views of Bolinas Lagoon, Stinson Beach, Mount Tamalpais, the Pacific Ocean, and San Francisco.
The property has sprawling vistas of rolling hills and verdant pastures. It's located near bird and seal sanctuaries and is about an hour from San Francisco. Considered a historical touchpoint in the region, the property sits near the small coastal towns of Bolinas and Stinson Beach.
The property includes a circa-1920s house with four bedrooms and a one-bedroom guest house.
The residential portion of the property features four structures, including a 1920s home with four bedrooms, a guest house, a caretaker's residence, and a converted garage. Adjacent to the residences is a barn built in the 1930s, a banquet hall with a performance stage, and a second large barn.
The kitchen is a new addition to the residence that Leibovitz upgraded, featuring a subway tile backsplash and gas range.
Leibovitz said in a statement to Business Insider that she had longed to find the perfect place to make her home on the West Coast, and when she purchased the property, she thought she'd found it.
"We were told of this extraordinary property that from the top of the hill had views of the lagoon and bay and the coast that are magnificent. It has its own special climate," Leibovitz said. "Everything can grow year round. There were 65 acres with an old milking barn that Ansel Adams had photographed. It had been used as a gathering place for country and folk music concerts in its day. We planned to partner with a legendary farmer over the hill to bring the place back to its former self as a working and teaching farm."
Leibovitz remodeled portions of the property but kept key fixtures like this rotary phone.
"I've spent many holidays with friends in Bolinas," Leibovitz said. "When the children were born we would go together and they would surf and pick up shells and stones along the shore. And I would occasionally look for "the place."
So when her oldest daughter seemed to be eyeing colleges in the Bay Area, Leibovitz snapped up the property.
But, she said, "things don't always go as planned."
"All three of my girls decided to go to college in the Northeast," prompting her to list the property for sale just five years later.
A weathered barn on the estate had previously been photographed by photographer Ansel Adams.
Adams snapped a shot of a barn on the farm during his travels through the West in 1932, with one photo later becoming part of a Smithsonian exhibition. Nearly a century later, Leibovitz came to own the property and continued its legacy of attracting iconic photographers to its grounds.
In addition to a hay barn and dairy barn, the property includes a 7-stall horse barn.
The equestrian-focused property features a 100' x 200' riding arena adjacent to the 7-stall barn. It includes multiple additional horse and livestock stalls and pastures along the expansive property.
Inside the old dairy barn is a complete recording studio built by a prior owner.
Prior to Leibovitz's purchase in 2019, the Bolinas farm was owned by Warren Hellman, a San Francisco financier and founder of the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival. He converted an unused farm building on the property into a music studio and another into a music venue to host private concerts.
For now, the historic property sits idle, waiting for its next owner to take control of its legacy.
"The Hideaway at 605 Horseshoe Hill Road stands as a historic property with generations of notable stewardship," Compass agent Alexander Lurie, who is co-listing the property with Nick Swenson, told Business Insider. "The site of many special events, concerts, and weddings over more than a century, The Hideaway has an indelible place in history — both for the SF Bay Area as well as globally — this special space has served as a launching pad of creative inspiration for renowned musical and visual artists of international repute."
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