Marilyn Monroe’s Houses: Inside Her Most Notable Addresses
Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Granted her legendary status, you might think Hollywood’s biggest icon owned some of the most glamorous mansions in Tinseltown history. In reality, Marilyn Monroe’s houses tended to be rentals and she only ever owned one property outright: a relatively modest Spanish Colonial Revival-style two-bedroom where she tragically died just six months after moving in.
Some of Monroe’s homes—already famous, due to their link to the star—were further immortalized when they were revisited as filming locations for the fictionalized 2022 biopic Blonde , starring Ana de Armas . The humble Los Angeles apartment she shared with her mother, for example, appears in the film in practically the same condition as when Monroe lived there as a child. At her final residence, the production restored Monroe’s bedroom—the site of her 1962 death—to its original state. She reportedly lived in more than 40 places during her lifetime, and below are some of the notable properties—luxury penthouses, Hollywood mansions, and Connecticut estates—where the screen siren spent seminal moments.
Mediterranean-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills
BLONDE
After stays at a women-only residence, assorted LA apartments and hotels, and the Beverly Hills home of her agent (who left his wife for her), in 1952, Monroe rented a house that subsequently became her marital dwelling with baseball player Joe DiMaggio. The pair were married for nine months in 1954. Built in 1938, the two-story walled-and-gated 3,335-square-foot Spanish-style villa has four bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, and a living room with a wood-beamed ceiling and French doors that open onto a terra-cotta terrace with canyon views. The Hollywood Hills house overlooks Runyon Canyon.
French Normandy–style penthouse in West Hollywood
Before Monroe and DiMaggio called it quits, the athlete accompanied his wife to New York City where they stayed in a St. Regis Hotel suite while she filmed The Seven Year Itch . After the couple split, she decamped to a French Normandy–style West Hollywood penthouse in a 1930 building designed by architects Leland Bryant and Samuel Coine. The Voltaire Apartments (as it was known in 1954) penthouse still has floor-to-ceiling windows and city views. Now renamed Granville Towers, the building has been home to many bold-faced names, including David Bowie, Nora Ephron, and Portia de Rossi, who lived for a time in Monroe’s former unit.
Connecticut guest house
Person to Person
Later that year, when Monroe relocated to New York in an effort to reinvent herself—taking acting classes with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio— she lived in a hotel close to the studio of her friend, photographer Milton H. Greene (some of whose images are recreated in Blonde ). She stayed with Greene —who became vice president of her new film production company—and his family intermittently in a guest suite adjacent to their converted Connecticut farmhouse from 1954 until the summer of 1956, when she married Miller, whom she had started seeing after reconnecting with him at the 1955 opening of his play View From A Bridge.
French country–style lake house
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller After Marriage Ceremony
Monroe may not have lived in this home, but it still played a significant role in her life. After a civil ceremony at the Westchester County Court House in White Plains in 1956, Monroe and Miller had a second Jewish ceremony and small reception on the lawn of the Westchester , New York, home of Miller’s agent, Kay Brown. The 4,291-square-foot four-bedroom, six-bath residence built in 1948 still boasts a first-floor private guest suite, glass-walled living room, European-style fireplaces, arched doorways, parquet floors, leaded windows, and wrought-iron elements including a second-floor balconette.
Prewar Manhattan apartment
Though many New York City buildings eschew thirteenth floors, that was the location of the airy prewar East 57th Street apartment where Monroe and Miller lived as Miller wrote the screenplay for what would be his wife’s final film, 1961’s The Misfits . The 2,190-square-foot three-bedroom three-and-a-half-bath apartment has high ceilings, a wood-burning fireplace, and impressive city views of the Queensboro Bridge and the East River. It’s currently for sale.
Colonial Connecticut estate
Arthur Miller
The couple also spent time at Miller’s 1769 Revolutionary War–era clapboard farmhouse on 350 acres in Roxbury, Connecticut . A “cool breeze always seemed to blow through the line of grand maples in front of the house,” Miller once wrote of the bucolic estate . The pair thought about knocking down the four-bedroom house that Miller bought in 1949 after writing Death of a Salesman and replacing it with a new design Monroe had commissioned from Frank Lloyd Wright . But Miller didn’t like the famed architect’s plan, which involved a dramatic domed ceiling, and didn’t want to take on a gut renovation. The playwright lived there until his death in 2005—requesting that he be taken there from his sister’s New York City apartment while in hospice. Upon his death, Miller donated 55 acres to the Roxbury Land Trust, and in 2015, his daughter Rebecca (with third wife Inge Morath) donated an additional 100 acres.
Mediterranean-style LA home
Marilyn Monroe 40th Anniversary
When the increasingly fragile Monroe’s marriage to Miller ended after five years, she bought her very first house , which she described as “a cute little Mexican-style house with eight rooms,” for $77,500 (or about $810,000, adjusted for inflation) in February 1962. The gated, L-shaped 1929 Spanish Colonial revival with a red-tile roof on a cul-de-sac had white stucco walls, two bedrooms (it now has four), adobe walls, and wood-beamed ceilings. Monroe’s bedroom had a tiled fireplace—as did the living room—with patio doors leading to a courtyard. A small guesthouse, a swimming pool, and a spacious garden rounded out the property. Monroe lived at the 2,900-square-foot residence, which she called her fortress, for a mere six months before her tragic death at the home.
In 2023, the property’s owner applied for a permit to tear down the historic dwelling. Widespread outrage prompted the LA city council to designate the home a cultural historic landmark, saving it from demolition . “We have an opportunity to do something today that should’ve been done 60 years ago. There’s no other person or place in the city of Los Angeles as iconic as Marilyn Monroe and her Brentwood home,” council member Traci Park said at the time. “To lose this piece of history, the only home that Monroe ever owned, would be a devastating blow for historic preservation and for a city where less than 3% of historic designations are associated with women’s heritage.”
Though her tenure at the home was short, it was immortalized in a Life magazine feature. “Anybody who likes my house, I am sure I will get along with,” she said.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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