Brad Pitt swaps LA mansions with Getty heiress as Carmel becomes ‘main’ home, reports say

The latest chapter in Brad Pitt’s real estate wheeling and dealing is coming to a close with a report that the actor has engaged in a rich people’s version of a “Trading Spaces”-style home swap with Getty Oil heiress Aileen Getty.

Pitt has purchased Getty’s three-bedroom, midcentury-modern home in Los Feliz for $5.5 million, after she bought his $33 million estate in the same Los Angeles neighborhood, the website Dirt reported this week. For Pitt, buying Getty’s elegantly sleek, 2,000-square-foot home is his version of “downsizing,” Architectural Digest also reported.

Brad Pitt Buys Aileen Getty’s Glassy Midcentury Modern House in Los Felizhttps://t.co/xNkDRjLQDh

— Tommy Lightfoot Garrett (@LightfootInHwd) April 6, 2023

Getty’s property should allow the movie star to have a more modest home base in Los Angeles while he reportedly makes his $39 million clifftop estate in Carmel Highlands his main residence.

TMZ reported last month that Pitt had sold the Los Feliz estate he’s owned for almost three decades — a property he once referred to as the “childhood home” for his six children with Angelina Jolie — and was moving to Carmel. TMZ said the Oscar winner plans to move to Northern California, where he purchased “Seaward,” a historic, castle-like oceanside home in Carmel Highlands last summer.

A Page Six report in December said that the 59-year-old Pitt would keep acting, but that he was looking to “step back” from some of his other Hollywood ventures to enjoy “a peaceful life.” It remains to be seen whether he’ll make picturesque Carmel-by-the-Sea his new fulltime home, or if he’ll just visit from time to time.

Pitt’s purchase of Getty’s home fits into his image as a serious architectural enthusiast. The 1960 property by midcentury architect Neil M. Johnson is known as the Steel House, because it is largely hewn from steel and glass, Dirt said. It features plenty of details prized by fans of midcentury design: terrazzo floors, cantilevered eaves and beamed ceilings. Big windows also look out onto tropical landscaping, a shimmering pool and a terrace with city views.

In January, Pitt put his Los Feliz compound with its 6,692-square-foot, Craftsman-style main house on the market, even though the property had special meaning for him. The “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” star began creating the estate in 1994, a couple of years after he first shot to stardom with his charismatic performance as a hunky hitchhiker in “Thelma & Louise.” He paid $1.7 million for the original Craftsman-style mansion that belonged to Cassandra Peterson, better known by her alter ego, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Brad Pitt ‘quietly puts his Los Feliz compound on the market for $40 million’ https://t.co/iahWS9Ts8q

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) January 17, 2023

Over the next decade, the actor picked up two contiguous properties to expand the compound and purchased two more after he divorced Jennifer Aniston and after he and Jolie became a couple in 2005, Architectural Digest said.

Pitt and Jolie were known for their globetrotting lifestyle, traveling with their six children from country to country for movie locations and for her U.N. humanitarian work. Still, the Los Feliz estate, with its swimming pool and skate park, remained the “childhood” home for their children, Maddox, Pax,  Zahara, Shiloh and twins Knox and Vivienne, as Pitt told GQ.

Pitt’s decision to downsize comes as all his children are getting older and his contentious divorce from Jolie reportedly strained his relationships with some of them. The possibility that Pitt could relocate to Carmel has some merit, given the report that he was stepping back from Hollywood after selling a majority stake in his storied Hollywood production company, Plan B.

“Brad has decided that he wants to live a peaceful life going forward and is deciding what ‘semi-retirement’ looks like for him,” a source told Page Six in December. For Pitt, the “peaceful life” could include Carmel.

Over the years, the picturesque coastal community has been known as the preferred first or second home for celebrities looking to escape the pressures of Hollywood life. Clint Eastwood is Carmel’s most famous denizen, while Doris Day also made it her longtime home until she died in 2019.