Ever since the 2021 sale of her Hello Sunshine production company, Reese Witherspoon has chosen to live primarily in her native Nashville, Tenn., rather than Los Angeles. And with a widely reported 2024 net worth of $440 million, it’s no surprise that the “Legally Blonde” actress and prolific real estate investor can afford some very nice houses — she owns no fewer than seven Tennessee properties, including her $18 million main residence.
Witherspoon, 48, still maintains a part-time residential toehold in California, in the form of a $5 million ranch-style home in L.A.’s affluent Brentwood neighborhood. And now it seems she’s in the mood to re-grow her Tinseltown holdings, this time with the recent purchase of a pricy but surprisingly modest bungalow.
Located on a leafy but otherwise mostly nondescript street in West L.A, in the often traffic-choked sprawl just east of Santa Monica, the 1930s residence is certainly attractive but hardly the sort of place you’d expect to find an A-list Hollywood actress. Behind a wooden fence and a thicket of wisteria, the low-slung house offers a compact front yard landscaped with drought-tolerant plantings and an even more compact driveway capable of accommodating two tandem-parked cars. There’s also a wee porch adjoining the magenta-hued front door.
The listing describes the petite home as a “hidden sanctuary” and “characteristically unique.” It’s certainly light and bright, with fresh white paint and shiny marmoleum floors throughout, and the public rooms are essentially one wall-free space, with the living, dining and kitchen areas married into one cozy “great room,” if you will.
And the open floorplan somewhat masks the home’s diminutive size; it spans all of 850 square feet, with two standard-sized bedrooms and just one tile-clad bathroom. But don’t let those modest specs fool you, because this property is far from cheap. Tax records reveal Witherspoon paid $1.9 million for the keys, or a whopping $400,000 over the asking price. If you’re wondering why anyone — even a fabulously rich Hollywood type — would pay nearly $2 million for a pre-WWII, 850-square-foot bungalow, that’s just the going rate these days for these sorts of homes on L.A.’s prodigiously expensive Westside.
Other cool property features here include a vintage Wedgewood kitchen stove, updated plumbing, a new central HVAC system and a backyard with a covered loggia and garden shed. Like the front yard, the backyard also offers drought-tolerant landscaping abundant with jasmine and olive trees, and there are raised garden beds for growing organic vegetables and such. The 6,000-square-foot property also includes a detached one-car garage, which is currently outfitted as a sort of laundry room/den/mancave hybrid.
Nice features aside, it seems impossible to imagine that Witherspoon herself will actually move into this home, particularly given that she already owns a much larger and more luxurious place in nearby Brentwood. Rather, we suspect this purchase was made for a fortunate family member, perhaps her 25-year-old daughter Ava Philippe — a UC Berkeley grad and model.
Whatever the case, this house just one more residential notch on Witherspoon’s proverbial property belt. In addition to her other L.A. home, the “Big Little Lies” star also maintains her aforementioned $18 million main residence in Nashville and a half-dozen nearby properties, some of which are reportedly used as offices or occupied by family members.
