Barbra Streisand’s houses have always been as fabulous as the singer herself

Barbra Streisand’s houses could be considered art projects rather than just simple shelters. The legendary performer’s love of interior decorating and art collecting dates back to before she had the budget to back it up. “I had no money to buy art, so I would buy old picture frames and put them on white walls, just framing space, which I thought was beautiful,” she once mused of her pre-fame days. Now, the actor and singer has the resources to take her passion projects to their height; from an early-American-themed estate with an invented historical backstory to an entirely Art Deco–style guesthouse, Babs tends to take her design projects to the next level. Read on to learn more about the properties that Streisand has owned.

Railroad apartment

“Ever since I can remember, I’ve had an instinct for decoration,” Streisand recalled to Architectural Digest in 1978. “I can remember my first apartment in New York—it was a railroad flat on Third Avenue—and how I filled it with screens and lacquered chests. Even when I had no money, there was always the need to transform my surroundings.” The then 19-year-old was on the cusp of her Broadway debut in 1961 when she moved into that first apartment, a tenement building with a seafood restaurant on the ground floor. “It was a third‑floor walk‑up, and as soon as you started up the narrow bare‑bones staircase, there was the smell of fish,” Streisand wrote in her 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra. The unit had “four little rooms in a line and a bathtub in the kitchen, and the rent was $60 a month.”

The Ardsley apartment

Streisand married her I Can Get It For You Wholesale costar, Elliot Gould, in 1963. The newlyweds moved into a duplex inside the Ardlsey, an Emery Roth–designed building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Situated on the 21st and 22nd floors of the Art Deco–style structure, the apartment spanned about 3,600 square feet, with an additional 2,500 square feet of terraces overlooking Central Park. Architectural Digest toured the dwelling in 1978 and Babs showed off her extensive collections of Art Deco and Art Nouveau furnishings and decor. “It took me a little time to be able to come out into the open and honestly say, ‘This is me, Barbra, and this is what I like,’” the star said then of developing her interior decorating style.

The penthouse unit remained under Streisand’s ownership until she sold it for $4.25 million in 2002, according to The New York Times.

Upper East Side town house

The Funny Girl star picked up another property across the park in 1970, when she bought a 9,200-square-foot town house on the Upper East Side for $420,000 (roughly $3.5 million today). The circa 1930 five-floor home had eight bedrooms and eight bathrooms. “This house represents a compromise for me,” Streisand, who had been rejected from two co-op buildings, told The New York Times that year. “I’ve never wanted to live in a house. But I’m going ahead with it anyway.” The actor, who said that she would “much rather have the 17 rooms horizontally than vertically,” also lamented the distance between the kitchen and the bedrooms: “Why, I’ll have to leave a supply of cupcakes on every floor.”

Streisand off-loaded the abode two years later.

Malibu compound

Streisand began amassing Malibu property in 1974 with her boyfriend at the time, Jon Peters, and continued snatching up the surrounding plots until her compound totaled over 22 acres. The bucolic grounds boasted five houses, one of which was done up in Art Deco style, down to the cars in the garage. “I thought it would be a really interesting exercise to have one theme,” Streisand told AD in 1993. The Art Deco House, as it was called, also featured a strict color scheme, which was restricted to the ranges of black to gray and burgundy to pale rose. Even the colors within those spectrums were kept separate from room to room: “I don’t put a black vase in the gray-and-burgundy room,” she explained. The project took Streisand about five years to complete.

The bathroom inside the Art Deco House

Photo: Ken Hively/Getty Images