Aaron Paul was standing in a blizzard when he swung the door open and waved in the camera crew. The Idaho snow had been falling for two weeks straight, the river outside was frozen at the edges, and the fire in the gathering room was already going. For anyone who has ever wondered what it actually feels like to live inside a space you spent three years building from scratch, the answer, at least here, was visible immediately: deer crossing the river, two resident black bears somewhere in the neighborhood, and a 26,600-pound piece of Montana moss stone craned into place before the ceiling could even go on.
This cross-country collection of celebrity home tours moves from that snow-buried Idaho valley to a 1924 Scottish hunting lodge in New York’s Hudson Valley, a mountain cabin with a half-finished puzzle that has defeated eight different minds across three separate trips, a Texas ranch where the mudroom doubles as a cowboy staging area, and beyond. What connects them is not square footage or price, but a shared instinct: every owner wanted a place that felt lived in before they ever arrived.
When the wood came from a barn and the stone came from a garden in Pennsylvania
The Idaho house that Aaron Paul and his wife built over three years pulls its character almost entirely from reclaimed material. Three barns built by an Amish community in Wisconsin around 120 years ago were disassembled, shipped west, and used to frame the main gathering room. Every countertop in the house is poured concrete, except for one large piece of stone Paul spotted at a garden in Pennsylvania while driving and immediately pulled over to claim. Interior designer Jake Arnold pushed for a glass-panel bathroom wall, an idea that the homeowners admit they had never seen executed anywhere before. The sauna wood came from a cedar tree dragged up from the bottom of a local lake, initially intended for a dining table until the grain changed their minds. Paul noted that the house Wi-Fi is deliberately hidden from the network list so guests cannot connect: ‘It’s a place to put away your phone. Just enjoy being relaxed.’
In the Hudson Valley, the house Quentin Tarantino tours was built in 1924 as a Scottish hunting lodge on what was once a 3,000-acre estate. The original blueprints label one room a linen closet. It is not a linen closet. It is a prohibition bar whose walls were signed by guests including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Babe Ruth, Walt Disney, and Joan Crawford, whose signature was accidentally covered with stain during renovation. Tarantino has asked his own friends to continue the tradition. A bronze casting of his hand, made by a Roman artisan at the premiere of The Hateful Eight in Rome, sits in the gun room alongside a pistol gifted by Samuel L. Jackson, one of seven given to cast members on the same production.
Puzzles, peacocks, and a chapel built from eBay
The mountain house belongs to a host who worked with designer Heidi Kier around a single brief: ‘grandma chic.’ A Gibson piano signed by Les Paul and limited to around 20 units worldwide was purchased after a friend found it online and called immediately. The dining room holds a puzzle that has resisted completion across three separate trips and roughly eight contributors. ‘It is laughing at me,’ the owner said. ‘It is mocking me.’
The North Carolina log cabin, shared by a couple married nearly 24 years, was designed by one half of the pair who trained as an interior designer. A grandmother’s clock stopped at 8:09 and has never been reset. It is always 8:09 in that house. The living room fireplace required a mantle sourced from High Point Market that was physically sliced in half so it could span the opening.
The Texas property built by Yolanda Hadid runs on a honey bar rather than a tequila bar, stocked with varieties collected from travel plus batches made at the family farm in Pennsylvania. The mudroom is designed around working cowboys arriving on horseback at 4:30 in the morning. A granddaughter’s first and second pairs of cowboy boots are mounted on the wall of the bunk room.
In Nashville, a musician built a functioning barn on a residential property, complete with five horses, a saloon that keeps Guinness permanently on tap, and a recording studio above the stalls that was soundproofed against horse noise until it was quiet enough to make records. A separate chapel on the same grounds was purchased online for $5,000, found to be too bug-damaged to salvage intact, and rebuilt using the original beams, livery flooring, and stained glass windows sourced from eBay.
Sienna Miller bought her English thatched cottage at 25 during what she described as a moment of real panic in London. It has six bedrooms and sleeps twelve people but reads as small from every angle. Film director Gabby Dal redesigned the interiors during lockdown, including knocking the primary bedroom ceiling open into the rafters and installing old door panels with original glass panes so the room could be left open to birdsong in summer.
Bryce Dallas Howard’s 1937 New York home is a replica of an 18th-century Bucks County farmhouse, the same county where she filmed her first feature. Depression-era glassware collected by her grandmother sits displayed openly throughout the kitchen after years hidden behind cabinet doors. Her son’s dedicated office space is the cabinet under the stairs.
Dita Von Teese tours a 1927 English Tudor where the stove is British racing green with copper-dipped plates, every sofa is by her own admission extremely uncomfortable, and a pool house has been converted into a full pub with custom stained glass featuring a swan, a feather, a rose, a champagne glass, and a magic mushroom. Karen Gillan closes the tour in a 1930s Los Angeles home where the bar is stocked exclusively with Scotch because she is Scottish, the office wallpaper depicts fox hunting that she is firmly opposed to, and the dining room wallpaper scheme extends onto the ceiling for what she called ‘a chaotic wallpaper party in the best way.’
A small bird from one home that ended up in another
On a shelf in Karen Gillan’s living room sits a small decorative bird. She explains that it came from Aaron Paul’s bar in Idaho, where apparently every guest who visits the Raven’s Den leaves with one. She was so familiar with the Idaho house from watching the original tour that when she finally visited in person, she had to pretend not to know where the bathroom was.
Back in Idaho, the river is still running just outside the bedroom window, close enough that Paul says he lies down in the freezing current after the sauna. The snow keeps falling. The fire keeps going. The 26,600-pound stone has not moved.
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