Left eerily vacant for years, these former celebrity homes have fascinating tales to tell. Once the luxury retreats of the rich and famous, an extraordinary series of events lead each one to be abandoned including reports of corruption, protracted legal battles and even an alleged cult takeover.
Click or scroll to reveal the stories behind these abandoned celebrity houses, including Bruce Lee's last family home, Boris Becker's squatted villa and Prince Andrew's dilapidated estate that was once a gift from the Queen...
Courtney Love put her grungy three-bedroom, two-bathroom country retreat in Olympia, Washington state on the market in 2018 with Virgil Adams Real Estate for £256,000 ($320k).
According to a Variety report, the seven-acre property had been unoccupied for years and was in a state of extreme disrepair at the time of sale.
The singer, film star and widow of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, acquired the property in 1995, more or less a year after the passing of her husband. The formerly hard-living rocker paid £315,000 ($447k) for the country retreat.
The realtor stated in the listing description that the home was a "major fixer" that required "a ton of work" to return it to a state fit for human habitation. Not mincing any words, the real estate agent stated that it needed 'everything' done, and presumably called for a buyer with very deep pockets.
The singer clearly hadn't stayed at the property in years, so decided to sell the home, which includes a number of neglected outbuildings, at a considerable loss, having already attempted to offload it in 2011.
Considering the property's condition, it's not difficult to figure out why Love opted for such a low asking price. The interior of the house was seriously rundown and, as you can see from this and the previous photo, the walls of the eight-stall stable were covered in graffiti, while bricks littered the floor. The outhouse was positively crying out for a comprehensive makeover.
While the former rock star's home was decrepit, to say the least, the guest cottage was in the worst state, having succumbed to fire damage some time ago.
Fortunately, a buyer was found and an offer was made in August 2018. Now off the market, the estate appears to have been sold at long last and is no doubt in the midst of a major refurb.
Flush with cash at the time, Boris Becker bought the idyllic Finca de Son Coll on the Spanish island of Mallorca in 1997. The German tennis ace purchased the property for a reported £478,000 ($598k) and proceeded to spend a fortune on it, adding a pool with a Moroccan-style pool house, a guesthouse, a basketball court and more.
But the dream home soon turned into a nightmare…
Becker was slapped with a £204,000 ($255k) fine in 2004 for additions that weren't approved by the authorities and was ordered to tear them down. In 2007, the property was put on the market for the purportedly hefty asking price of £14.6 million ($18.4m) but no buyer could be found.
The Grand Slam singles champion struggled to afford the upkeep. In 2011, Becker was sued by his gardener who was owed £283,000 ($354k).
As ordered by the Spanish court, the property was confiscated until the outstanding bill was paid. It was confiscated again in 2014 when Becker failed to settle an invoice for building work.
Becker eventually paid the invoice and recouped the property, only to lose it for good following his bankruptcy in 2017. The finca passed to the administrators but was commandeered by German ex-pat Georg Berres and members of the so-called Intergalactic Auxiliary and Rescue Command.
While living there, Berres documented the state of the once-beautiful home. It had clearly been abandoned midway through building works, with piles of furniture left in the overgrown garden and the interior stripped almost bare.
In October 2019, a local court ruled against the squatters and ordered them to leave, with the crew removed by police in January 2020. Now crumbling and decidedly grubby, the decadent abandoned mansion faces an uncertain future.
Becker may have had the law on his side when it came to squatters, but according to The Guardian, he was jailed for two and a half years in April 2022 for hiding millions of pounds of assets following his bankruptcy – including his share in a £1 million ($1.2m) property in Germany. The former tennis star served just eight months of his sentence and was released from prison in December 2022 and deported from the UK.
Despite Prince Andrew's many high-profile troubles, it's said he was the late Queen's favourite child. In fact, in 1986, she gifted her now-disgraced son and his wife, Sarah, Duchess of York, a 665-acre parcel of land on the Sunninghill Park Estate in Berkshire following their wedding that same year.
Completed in 1990, this property was dubbed 'Southyork' and the 'Dallas Palace' due to its uncanny resemblance to the ranch house in the 1980s TV show of the same name. Other commentators likened it to an out-of-town Tesco supermarket.
A 12-bedroom mansion was designed featuring grand reception rooms, stables and a swimming pool, and construction work began on the site in 1987.
Far from a stately home, this was to be a modern mansion with all the mod cons to accommodate their growing family in style. Princess Beatrice, who is currently ninth in the line of succession, was born in August 1988 and was two years old when they moved into the sprawling house. Her sister, Eugenie, who is eleventh in line to the throne, arrived in March 1990. Sunningdale was the only home she knew until she was 16 years old.
Andrew and Fergie divorced in 1996, yet the duo continued to live under the same roof with their two daughters. Following the Queen Mother's passing in 2002, the Duke decamped to the Royal Lodge in Windsor, her former residence, and Sunninghill Park was put on the market. The Duchess and their daughters followed in 2006, leaving the property vacant.
The Duke is said to have remortgaged the park to cover the cost of renovating the Royal Lodge. A peek inside the mansion in 2008, just two years after Fergie and the two young princesses moved out, gives us an idea of the grandeur in which they lived. Let's take a look...
In this formal reception room, an elegant carved marble fireplace is flanked by two enormous floor-to-ceiling windows, swathed in reams of gold-tasselled brocade.
The chevron wood flooring would look at home in a ballroom, which this room could very well have been. At the very least, it must have been a room in which the couple entertained important guests.
The library may have been Prince Andrew's private office or study, judging by the rather masculine design choices of olive green walls, burgundy carpets and heavily carved wood fire surround. The books left behind on the shelves look brand new and include classics such as Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo and Ian Fleming's Bond classic You Only Live Twice.
Over the years, the empty house fell into disrepair, so it came as a surprise when it sold in 2007 for £15 million ($18.8m), £3 million ($3.8m) over the asking price and £24 million ($30m) today, in a deal viewed by some as suspect. The rumoured buyer was Kazakhstani investor Kenes Rakishev, at a time when Prince Andrew represented British business in Kazakhstan.
The ultimate owner was later revealed to be billionaire oligarch Timur Kulibayev, son-in-law of long-time Kazakh leader and Putin ally, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Despite the former president reportedly running a totalitarian state, Prince Andrew is known to have gone goose hunting with him.
Despite having an owner, by 2009 Sunninghill Park lay abandoned. In December 2013, planning permission was granted to replace the rundown royal residence with a sprawling manor, but demolition work didn't begin until 2015. A far cry from the British royal family's grand private homes, the eyesore was eventually reduced to rubble in 2016. A shiny new mansion has taken shape in its place.
You may already be aware of Mohamed Hadid’s doomed mega-mansion, since the colossal spread has been in and out of the news for over the last decade. Owned by the multimillionaire real estate developer, the extensive estate could – at one time – be found on a hillside plot in Bel Air, Los Angeles.
Since construction began in 2011, Hadid has been locked in a fierce legal battle with the Los Angeles authorities. The rather ambitious self-build project has caused plenty of controversy due to its scale and location.
Hadid, who is the father of supermodels Gigi and Bella, bought the 1.2-acre plot in 2011 for £1.5 million ($1.9 million). At the time, it was the site of a 1950s ranch house, which Hadid tore down to make way for the huge house he said would “last forever," in an interview with Town & Country Magazine. "Bel-Air will fall before this will," he said.
Hadid apparently intended to build a 14,000-square-foot mansion on the lot, but by 2014 the property had grown significantly in size, without the necessary permits from the city of Los Angeles. Pictured here by Billionaire Drone, the local authorities discovered that Hadid's new home covered 30,000 square feet across seven floors.
They immediately revoked the developer's building permits, which should have drawn any construction work to a close. Yet Hadid carried on regardless, adding a third floor and pool deck, all without a license. The LA authorities decided to take action and Hadid was sentenced to 200 hours of community service for illegal construction.
Then, in 2018, Hadid's neighbours, who dubbed the huge manse 'Starship Enterprise', rallied together and, according to the LA Times, brought a lawsuit against him over fears the hillside home was on the brink of collapse.
After a lengthy legal battle, the developer lost his case in June 2020 when, as reported by the Daily Mail, the Supreme Court of California declared the property, pictured here by Billionaire Drone, a 'clear and present danger'.
Captured here by The Hollywood Fix, the property sat unfinished and abandoned for 10 years, and after a failed attempt to stop the destruction by declaring bankruptcy, the unbelievably expensive abandoned mansion hit the real estate market in January 2021, for £6.8 million ($8.5m) which is a huge loss, considering the real estate tycoon hoped to sell it for £80 million ($100m).
Labelled only as a development opportunity, the Hilton & Hyland listing stated that the current structure would be demolished following the closure of escrow, at no additional cost. After failing to find a buyer, the price was lowered to £4.4 million ($5.5m), before it was auctioned off for £4 million ($5m) by Premier Estates Auction Co. The dilapidated manse was purchased in December 2021 by Sahara Construction, according to the LA Times.
Demolition of the property finally started in March 2022, and because of the property's hilltop location overlooking other homes, the property has been carefully dismantled.
It's now been totally razed to the ground, according to the most recent reports by the Daily Mail. This will likely be a big relief for neighbours – Hadid’s own architect reportedly feared the building would ‘slide down the hill and kill someone’. By 2023 Hadid had settled with his neighbours stating: "I've moved on with my life — that's all behind me now."
Destined to become the UK home of Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour, the Elizabethan manor in Oxfordshire known as Hook End was built in 1580 for the Bishop of Reading.
Over the years, the 11-bedroom mansion has passed through the property portfolios of the rich and famous, from Selfridges' owner Sir Charles Clore to Alvin Lee, lead singer of the band Ten Years After, who purportedly snapped up the house in 1972 and built a recording studio in the barn.
David Gilmour bought the property in 1980 and several of his band's albums were recorded in the studio. He sold up in 1986 and Hook End eventually passed to record producer Trevor Horn, who transformed the property into a luxe recording venue.
An impressive line-up of musicians cut singles and LPs there, including Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Rod Stewart, the Manic Street Preachers, Seal, and the Smiths.
Steeped in history, not to mention rumours of spectral visitors, the Smiths singer Morrissey claimed to have been visited by the ghost of a monk during his stay at the manor. The phantom would appear during the wee hours of the morning as if to wake people to pray.
Tragedy struck the historic home in 2006, when Trevor Horn's wife, Jill Sinclair, was accidentally injured by their son, Aaron, who was practising with his air rifle, unaware his mother was nearby.
Sinclair never fully recovered. Horn decided to sell up following the accident and the property was bought by producer Mark White in 2009 for £13.6 million ($17m).
White invested in the studio but the house lay neglected for years. Trevor Bishenden, aka TrevBish Photography, captured the property's dilapidated interiors in 2017 when the manor appeared to be completely abandoned, with rising damp and wallpaper peeling off the walls.
Fortunately, Hook End has since been given a new lease of life and renovated from top to bottom. There may even be plans afoot to add a luxury pool complex.
Built in 1925 and subsequently redesigned by noted Hollywood Regency architect, John Elgin Woolf, this Spanish Revival mansion in LA's Beverly Hills was purchased in the mid-1950s by Oscar-winning director Vincente Minnelli, following his divorce from Judy Garland.
During her childhood, the former couple's daughter, Liza, spent much of her time at the house.
Minnelli and Garland married in June 1945 and, less than a year later in March 1946, they welcomed Liza into the world. Unfortunately, the couple's marriage quickly fell apart. Minnelli's star was rising and he would go on to win the Best Director Oscar for his film Gigi in 1958.
However, Garland's career was going in the opposite direction. She was fired after 15 years at MGM and her mental health took a turn for the worst. The pair divorced in 1951.
The post-split home on Crescent Drive was lavishly decorated by Vincente Minnelli, with numerous chandeliers and opulent fabrics and furnishings.
When the famed director passed away in 1986 at the age of 83, the house was left to Liza, now a big-time Hollywood star in her own right, on one condition…
While Liza was granted ownership, Mr Minnelli instructed that his fourth wife, Lee, should be permitted to live in the house as long as she desired.
The arrangement worked out fine until 2000 when Liza decided to sell the property. Lee was offered a condo but turned it down and resolutely stayed put, even when the house was sold in 2002.
Lee died there in 2009 but the home was seemingly left to languish and decay, attracting urban explorer Adam The Woo there in 2014. In pictures captured on his YouTube channel, the dilapidated home wasn't looking its best. Holes peppered the ceilings, the wallpaper was peeling away and shabby furniture and debris were scattered on the floors.
Sadly, the home appears to be abandoned to this day.
Before his fall from grace, Michael Jackson teamed up with Paul McCartney to record 'Say Say Say' in 1983. The former Beatle stayed at Sycamore Valley Ranch in California when the pair were recording the single’s music video, and after visiting McCartney there, Jackson fell in love with the place, promising to buy it someday.
Some years later in 1988, when the King of Pop hit 30, he acquired the American estate for an estimated £15.6 million ($19.5m). Jackson renamed the property Neverland after the magical island in Peter Pan and set about creating his very own amusement park.
The singer had two railways and a station built to complement the six-bedroom Tudor-style mansion that came with the property and installed a petting zoo and numerous amusement rides.
Neverland had everything from a Ferris wheel and pirate ship ride to a carousel and bumper cars.
Jackson hosted glittering events at the ranch, including the 1991 wedding of his close friends, Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky, and often invited children to stay, sometimes without their parents or legal guardians. Needless to say, Jackson's behaviour raised suspicions.
Neverland was ransacked by police when allegations came to light and the singer was charged with child abuse in 2003. Jackson was eventually cleared of all charges, though 2019's harrowing Leaving Neverland documentary has raised fresh allegations.
Drowning in debt, the disgraced singer struggled to hold on to the property and Neverland Ranch was shut down in 2006.
After Jackson defaulted on the ranch's mortgage, investment firm Colony Capital bought a majority stake in Neverland in 2008 for £18 million ($22.5m).
Following Jackson's passing in 2009, the property fell into disrepair. It’s clear that Neverland is deemed toxic real estate because the controversial home has been put up for sale several times over the past few years but has proved, unsurprisingly, impossible to sell.
Mike Tyson snapped up this glitzy confiscated mansion in Southington, Ohio at a sheriff's sale in 1989 for the bargain price of £240,000 ($300k).
The 25,000-square-foot pad was built in 1979 by local politician Ted Vannelli, who was later jailed on corruption charges. Captured by photographer, Johnny Joo, these images were featured on the Architectural Afterlife website.
The former heavyweight champion boxer spared no expense on the magnificent five-bedroom mansion, which was decked out with an enormous pool, two massive kitchens, three cages for Tyson's expensive Bengal tigers, copious amounts of marble, crystal chandeliers and zebra-print carpets.
Whether the mansion is cursed or not is anyone's guess, but three of its owners have ended up behind bars. In 1992 Tyson spent three years in prison. Upon his release in 1995, the troubled boxer returned to live at the property.
Up to his eyeballs in debt thanks to his spendthrift lifestyle, the ex-con sold the property in 1999 to infomercial tycoon Paul Monea for £1 million ($1.3m), making a tidy profit on the transaction.
Like the former owners of the property, Monea also ended up in the clanger – he was jailed in 2007 for money laundering.
The mansion was confiscated once again and fell into a dilapidated state until it was sold in 2010 at yet another sheriff's auction to health club entrepreneur and auto racing team owner, Ron Hemelgarn.
Many of the fixtures and fittings were removed but some, including Tyson's bathtub, reportedly worth £1.6 million ($2m), remained untouched. Hemelgarn never lived at the mansion but did manage to restore part of the property.
The estate was passed on in 2014 to the Living Word Sanctuary Church and now serves as the religious community's base and principal place of worship. Much like these abandoned stately homes, we're sure this pad harbours plenty of secrets...
During the early noughties, you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing Nelly's huge hits 'Dilema' and 'Hot In Here'. The rapper is still thought to be worth around $70 million (£55.2m).
Back in 2002, during the height of his fame, the star bought this lavish Tuscan-style mansion in St. Louis, Missouri for an estimated £1.6 million ($2m).
Reports suggest that Nelly never actually wanted to live in the house. Instead, he purchased it with the intention of flipping it, much like some other well-known celebrity house developers. But for some unknown reason, the 10,799-square-foot mansion has remained empty for the past two decades.
Though it's unclear why the 'Ride Wit Me' singer ditched his makeover plans, the house is likely to be expensive to restore. Sitting on a prominent 12-acre plot, the home benefits from fantastic landscape views from almost every room.
While the exterior has a palatial white stucco finish with castle-like turrets, the interior is brimming with high-end fixtures, like vaulted ceilings, arched windows, marble floors, full-height fireplaces and imposing columns. Constructed in 1998, the home featured six bedrooms and seven bathrooms, as well as a grand entrance foyer, a double-height lounge and a great room overlooking the garden.
Yet it remained unfinished. Nelly eventually decided to part ways with the property, listing it for just £480,000 ($599,000k) in February 2021. When it was put on the market, the house had no plumbing and some rooms were missing flooring but it found a buyer within just a few days of hitting the market.
Outside, the huge garden offers an abandoned basketball court and pool, as well as woodland trails that wind down towards the Meramec River valley.
It was reported in June 2022 that the house had been bought by the Kingdom of God Global Church, based in St. Louis. Headed up by the controversial leader David E. Taylor, who once claimed he could bring people back to life, the church has allegedly bought up a number of statement properties in the last couple of years.
Nearly two years later and it seems that not much has happened to the house since it was sold. A report in February 2024 by St Louis-based Riverfront Times said that the house is still empty, according to a YouTuber who had visited the property. Who knows whether this long-abandoned suburban mansion will ever be brought back to its former glory...
Widely considered the most influential martial artist of all time, Bruce Lee had already carved out a moderately successful Hollywood career when he moved back to Hong Kong in 1971. But, tired of being offered the usual supporting roles and typecast TV characters, he had big plans to make his own kung-fu movies.
Bruce and his wife Linda Lee Cadwell lived in a two-storey townhouse in one of the most expensive residential districts with their two children Brandon and Shannon. In the short time that they lived there, Lee made a series of films in quick succession that would guarantee his cinematic legacy: Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon, the latter of which was released in Hong Kong just six days after his death.
The home on Cumberland Road, affectionately known as 'The Crane's Nest', was in Kowloon Tong an exclusive neighbourhood of mansions on streets with distinctively English-sounding names.
When Bruce Lee died in 1973 at the age of 32, his Hong Kong home (seen here in 2009) was quickly purchased by Chinese philanthropist Yu Pang-lin in 1974. After some years it was converted into a "love hotel" where rooms could be rented by the hour.
Pang-lin later said he was planning to sell the property to raise funds for victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, according to The South China Morning Post. However, Lee's fans wanted to see the home preserved in Lee's honour but Pang-lin's request to turn it into a museum was rejected by the government.
Pang-lin died in 2015, leaving the mansion and his entire estate to charity. In 2019, the South China Morning Post reported that it was going to be converted to a Chinese studies centre, but faced too many structural problems by this point. Maintaining it was almost impossible.
Here's what one of the hotel rooms looked like in around 2009. Outside, the gardens had become overgrown and were starting to encroach inside the building among remnants from its life as a hotel.
In 2017, the urban explorer known as Illsight gained access to the abandoned building and found, to his surprise, that the power and water were on and working and that the property was largely untouched.
It was said that certain original elements were to be preserved in the planned Chinese studies centre including four window frames and the colourful 3D mosaic made by Lee that once adorned the wall. However, the original house was demolished in September 2019.
In the video, he discovers a lot of bedrooms and bathrooms, as you would expect from a hotel, plus a working kitchen with chopsticks, a wok, cleaning products and even cooking oil still on the shelves.
Today an expensive private residence sits on the plot which is worth a fortune in Hong Kong's searing property market. Sadly, a unique piece of Bruce Lee's life and history has been lost forever.
Loved this? Like and follow us on Facebook for more amazing celebrity homes