We Timed Our Own Free Hollywood Tour. It's Not a 60-Minute Drive.
By Simir Shah
Updated September 13, 2026
We've had a free DIY Celebrity Home Tour on the site for a while — start at the Hollywood Walk of Fame, loop through Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills, Bel-Air and Brentwood, spot famous homes and filming locations from the car, no tickets, no tour bus. What we hadn't actually done was time it.
So this week we did — ran the real coordinates for all 16 stops at honest city-driving speeds, not highway speed, plus a couple minutes at each stop for photos. The number that came back: the full loop is closer to three hours than one. Not because there are too many stops, but because two of them — the Brentwood houses and Walt Disney's old place in Los Feliz — sit well off the Beverly Hills core. Getting to them and back is a real detour each way, not a few extra minutes.
So now it's three real tours, not one
- Express, ~60 minutes — the tight Beverly Hills core only: the Witch's House, Greystone Mansion, Lucille Ball's old place on Roxbury Drive, and Taylor Swift's estate. Good for a nap-time window or a stop on the way to somewhere else.
- Full Tour, ~2 hours — adds Holmby Hills, the Beverly Crest hill climb (Rihanna, Adele), and two new stops we added this round.
- Extended Loop, ~3 hours — everything, including the Brentwood and Los Feliz stops. Nothing got cut from the original list — it just isn't sold as a quick drive anymore.
Pick whichever fits your day on the tour page — each one has its own printable route and one-tap Google Maps link.
Two new stops, and one we took out
We added The Beverly Hills Hotel — the actual Pink Palace, Beverly Hills' first official historic landmark, where Marilyn Monroe kept a favorite bungalow — and Greenacres, silent-film star Harold Lloyd's 44-room 1928 estate, still standing essentially as he built it. Both are zero-privacy-concern stops: one's a working hotel, the other's a preserved historic landmark, not someone's current home.
We also pulled a stop that shouldn't have been there. The old list included a former Beverly Hills home tied to a Bollywood star. Digging into it properly, the only real source was his own social post thanking his "Airbnb host" — he stayed there once, he didn't own it. That's not a home tour stop, so it's gone.
One correction, and a story worth knowing
We also had a fact wrong: Adele's Beverly Park compound was described as "a 1961 ranch-style home." It isn't — it's a Mediterranean-style compound Sylvester Stallone had built in the late 1990s, which Adele bought in 2022 for $58 million. Fixed.
And one stop got a story worth telling: in 2023, the owners of Marilyn Monroe's only home — the one house she ever owned outright, on a quiet Brentwood cul-de-sac — tried to tear it down. The city stepped in, made it a Historic-Cultural Monument specifically to stop the demolition, and a judge upheld the block. It's still standing because of that. It's the westernmost stop on the Extended Loop.
The whole route — all three lengths — is free on the DIY Celebrity Home Tour page, with a printable guide for the glovebox. View from public streets only, and never block a driveway.
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