Cecil B. DeMille’s house in Los Feliz has sold, Angelina Jolie has moved on, and the most famous name attached to the deal belongs to the one person the listing agent says did not buy it.
For about ten days this autumn, Madonna was widely reported to have bought Angelina Jolie’s house in Los Feliz, the Laughlin Park estate where Cecil B. DeMille lived for more than forty years. Then Ernie Carswell, who co-listed it, went on a property show and said she had not. The house has sold, though nobody connected to the deal has said to whom.
The gap between those two facts has been filled with a great deal of confident copy. The record so far is shorter, and in places more interesting.
Laughlin Park, 1913 to 1959
The house went up in 1913 to a design Hola! credits to the architect B. Cooper Corbett, set on 2.1 acres behind the gates of Laughlin Park. Three years later DeMille bought it from a local businessman. He stayed until his death in 1959, long enough to make both Samson and Delilah and The Ten Commandments from that address. The man who parted the Red Sea on screen went home to a gated corner of Los Feliz.
His family held on well after him and kept it until the late 1980s, according to Robb Report. That is roughly seventy years under one name, a long tenure for Los Angeles.
What stands there now is less a house than a small settlement. The main residence runs to about 11,000 sq ft, with six bedrooms and ten bathrooms. Around it sit a guest house, a pool house, a tea house and a fitness studio. The tea house is the detail people repeat. The fitness studio is the one that tells you which century you are in.
The spring of 2017, and a buyer
By the time Jolie arrived, Lisa Lyons and Richard Grossman had spent six years renovating. They put the estate on the market on 27 March 2017, and Fox News reported it in contract within about three weeks, with Jolie as the buyer. Robb Report puts what she paid at $24.5m, which would become the yardstick for the sale.
She bought it a few months after filing for divorce from Brad Pitt in September 2016. The divorce was not finalised until December 2024, which meant the DeMille house served as her Los Angeles base for almost the whole of it. Some houses are bought for a life. This one was bought for a stretch of one, and it did the job for more than eight years.
May to September 2026, on the market
Jolie listed the estate in May at $29.85m, two months before the twins, Knox and Vivienne, turned 18, which made all six of her children adults: Maddox is 25, Pax 22, Zahara 21 and Shiloh 20.
On 24 September it sold for $24.75m, about four months after it came to market. TMZ says it was first to report the sale and that it did not name the buyer, a restraint few others would show. The price landed close to what Jolie had paid in 2017 and some way under the May asking figure. Commissions and costs have not been made public, so the price tells you what the house fetched and nothing about what anyone kept.
Four months is a respectable pace for a trophy house with a single obvious kind of buyer. Anyone who wants DeMille’s tea house wants it very specifically.
Late September, and a famous name
From around 28 September the name in circulation was Madonna’s. She is 68, she has bought and sold in Los Angeles before, and nobody needs a fact-check to imagine her in a house with a tea house.
Robb Report ran the story on 2 October. The Real Deal and Hola! followed on 6 October. By our count at least five outlets named her as the buyer between 28 September and 6 October, and not one of them carried a word from her representatives or from Jolie’s.
The appeal was obvious enough. An Oscar winner sells to the Material Girl, in a house built for the director of The Ten Commandments. The story had three generations of Hollywood fame and a gated drive, and it needed only one more fact, a confirmation, which never came.
8 October, on a property show
Carswell, the co-listing agent, used The Society Group’s Real Talk to say that Madonna was not the buyer. He would not say who was, and cited a non-disclosure agreement. TMZ carried the denial the same day.
The headlines did not all catch up. Several still name Madonna in the title and add the denial further down, which leaves a reader to choose between the top of a page and its middle. DDW’s reading is simpler, because the person paid to sell the house has said, on the record, who did not buy it, and nobody on the buying side has said anything at all. Until someone does, the agent’s word is the only firm statement in the story.
Discretion at this end of Los Feliz is part of what the money buys. An NDA on a house this well known is less a formality than a feature, as much a part of the deal as the guest house.
October onwards, and the next address
Jolie, meanwhile, has places to be. The Real Deal’s subhead on 6 October had her selling ahead of a move to Cambodia, where Robb Report notes she has owned a traditional longhouse on a rural estate for more than twenty years. Reports of where she will settle have pointed in more than one direction since, and she has confirmed none of them.
The DeMille house has kept its own counsel through more than a century of Hollywood, and it is keeping it now. The tea house, the pool house and those 2.1 acres behind the Laughlin Park gates have passed to someone with the means and the lawyers to stay unnamed.
Whoever bought DeMille’s tea house is, for now, a name inside a non-disclosure agreement.
Read Next: Madonna Bought DeMille’s House and the Deed Won’t Say So
Cover photographs: Harald Krichel via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0); via Wikimedia Commons.
