Diane Keaton’s Legacy as a House Renovator and Flipper

The daughter of a real estate agent, Diane Keaton remembered holding her father’s hand while touring $15,000 model homes in Santa Ana, Calif., in the 1950s.

It’s a memory she returned to often in interviews and in her memoir, as she struggled to explain how the search for her dream home became, in her words, an “obsession.” It so consumed her that her own daughter would later count 15 addresses by the time she turned 18.

“I was dream-house bound, dream-house inspired and dream-house obsessed,” Ms. Keaton wrote in her 2014 memoir.

Not unlike the characters she played on-screen, her taste in real estate was idiosyncratic and deeply her own.

“She’s quirky. She’s interesting. You can tell she has this authenticity,” said Frank Langen, a Compass real estate agent who is currently representing the seller of the Rustic Canyon home designed by Lloyd Wright — son of Frank Lloyd Wright — that she renovated and flipped. “Most of us aren’t very original and we’re always trying to figure out what’s cool and hip, and she was definitely, like, a tastemaker as an individual, in her acting style, in her clothing style, and that translated to houses and real estate.”

He and other agents described a “Diane Keaton effect,” estimating that her touch could raise a property’s value by as much as 30 percent.

Over the decades, her real estate holdings and restoration projects included a historic Mayan Revival home by Lloyd Wright in the neighborhood of Los Feliz, as well as the midcentury modern estate in Rustic Canyon commissioned by the film composer Alfred Newman. She bought a Spanish Colonial in Bel Air designed by the architects Wallace Neff and John Byers in 2002, and restored and sold it for $16.5 million in 2005. There was the Spanish Colonial Revival in Beverly Hills that she bought in 2007 and sold three years later to the TV producer Ryan Murphy. Another of her transformed Spanish Colonials caught the eye of Madonna.

In Laguna Beach, she bought, rehabbed and sold at least two vintage 1920s beach houses. The rehabbed Cape Cod she bought in 2012 was sold a few years later at a profit of nearly $1.4 million.

In her telling, in some years, she made more from real estate than she did from Hollywood.

Dream Homes

Ms. Keaton was in her 30s when the success of “Annie Hall” — the 1977 release that won her an Oscar and made her a household name — allowed her to buy a New York apartment facing Central Park with a 360-degree wraparound view of the city.

“I lived in a dream house, but it wasn’t enough,” she wrote in her memoir, describing how she felt a restlessness. She returned to Los Angeles and bought a dilapidated Spanish Colonial on Roxbury Drive, which her agent described as a tear down. She restored it and moved into it. A few years later, the restlessness returned and she bought another, and then another.

She cut a familiar figure in the canyons and wind-swept coves surrounding Los Angeles, real estate agents said.

“She showed up in her hat and her black outfit,” Andrew Graff, a Compass real estate agent, remembered of the day in 2018 when she visited the property he and his partner, Mike Johnson, were listing. “She looked like she was coming out of a magazine.”

The home they were showing in Laguna Beach was nicknamed “The Ark” because it was perched like a boat on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It had portholes and handrails made of knotted rope, but the nearly 100-year-old home needed work. “In this market, if you have a home that’s interesting or distinctive, there are certain players and investors who you know might come look at it,” Mr. Graff said. “Diane Keaton was one of those people.”

She did not buy the property, but when she looked at it, she saw potential and spent time chatting with the agents, floating ideas for improvements.

After buying the property in 2011, she hired the designer Cynthia Carlson. The collaboration began with a blunt warning: “She’s like, ‘I’m difficult.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, I’ve dealt with difficult people.’ And she said, ‘No, I’m really difficult,’” said Ms. Carlson, who believes that she was hired most likely because she was not yet a well-known designer, which made Ms. Keaton feel more secure about imposing her vision.

Every day, Ms. Keaton woke up at 4:30 a.m. and cut out pictures from books and magazines that inspired her, filling three-ring binders, according to Ms. Carlson. One entire binder was dedicated to barn doors.

“She approached architecture the same way she developed her incredible style,” said Ms. Carlson. “She had such a keen eye but at the same time was not afraid to be quirky or unconventional. When we were designing, she kept eliminating the windows. And part of me wondered if this was akin to wearing turtlenecks and a hats.”

As the vision for the house unfolded, Ms. Keaton discovered Pinterest, Ms. Carlson said. Her pins on her account — @keatondiane — became like a digital binder, and she called the book that she published about the home in 2017 “The House That Pinterest Built.”

Her ideas were sometimes so out of the box that the designer and architect struggled to turn her vision into reality. The property should consist of several homes and look like an Italian village, Ms. Keaton said at one point. At another, she became enamored of the German designer Erwin Heerich, whose tower of brick built in the floodplain of the Erft river blends into the nature around it, Ms. Carlson said.

To help her conceptualize it, they used chalk and two-by-fours to map out each wing of the house, and she drove her car into the imagined bay, testing the angle of a turn that existed only in her mind. She started to hover around one central idea: an uninterrupted brick facade, its lines complete — not even a window could break up the pattern.

She excavated a childhood memory to tie it all together: the story of “The Three Little Pigs,” which her mother had read to her. The wolf huffs and puffs but can’t blow down the brick house.

Ms. Keaton described how she and her children moved 15 times in her memoir: “The moves, all 15 of them, centered on the dream of a beautiful life lived in a beautiful home. As with all addicts I found that each house fell short.”

According to property records, Ms. Keaton, represented by her trust, still owned the home at the time of her death — one of the few properties she never sold.

Vivian Marino contributed reporting from New York. Kirsten Noyes and Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.