Inside Carrie Fisher's Homes: A $925,000 House, a $25,000 Lamp and a $18 Million Legacy

Carrie Fisher bought her 2,600-square-foot Los Angeles home for $925,000 in 1984, roughly a year after returning as Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi. The three-bedroom house, purchased from Starsky & Hutch star David Soul, sat on about one acre with a sauna, a pool and a forest of bamboo. Channing Tatum bought the same property for $6 million in 2015, according to Variety — a more than sixfold increase over three decades.

Fisher, who would have turned 70 this year, spent her life in a series of remarkable Los Angeles homes. A new photographic retrospective traces that domestic history, from her 1950s childhood in Holmby Hills to the Spanish-style Hollywood Hills estate she shared, in her final years, with her mother Debbie Reynolds next door.

Where did the Fisher story begin?

Carrie Fisher was about 18 months old in 1958, when the family moved to a white-brick, four-bedroom house on Conway Avenue in Holmby Hills. Her parents were Singin' in the Rain star Debbie Reynolds and singer-actor Eddie Fisher. "We needed a bigger house and found a white-brick, two-story, four-bedroom place," Reynolds wrote in her memoir Debbie: My Life. "It was a spacious house with a large family room and a big bay window that overlooked a pool and a rose garden."

The parents divorced in 1959. Eddie Fisher left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor after the death of Taylor's husband, Mike Todd. Carrie and her brother Todd moved with their mother to a Beverly Hills house owned by Reynolds' second husband, businessman Harry Karl. Carrie later recalled the residence felt "more like a place where you would get your passport stamped" than a home. It had three swimming pools, a five-car garage with at least two Rolls-Royces, and a projection room the size of a small theater.

What objects survived the marriages?

Fisher married musician Paul Simon in 1983 at age 26, in a private ceremony at his Central Park West apartment attended by Billy Joel, George Lucas, Mike Nichols, Robin Williams and Art Garfunkel, among others, the Washington Post reported. The marriage lasted less than a year. But a Muller Frères lamp — bought for $25,000 during what Fisher called a "manic" shopping spree — stayed with her for decades.

"That lamp always represented being married to Paul," she told AD. "Whenever we were separating—and meant it—I'd take that. No luggage, just the lamp."

How did she make a house her own?

In 1987 Fisher published her semi-autobiographical debut novel, Postcards from the Edge, which became a bestseller. The same year, she told the Los Angeles Times she never fully belonged in Los Angeles. "I don't dress right," she said. "I don't look right. I don't embrace the values of the community."

Her estate, described by writer Lisa Liebmann in a September 1990 Interview feature as having a "whimsically Western motif," included a driveway gate with a painted rodeo scene, a plaque reading "Wow! That Was Some Cup of Coffee Institute of Alternative Life-Styles," a tree house signed "Beware of Trains" and a fake cow. When Jack Nicholson visited, he asked, "Just exactly how old are the children?" — about two years before her daughter Billie Lourd was born.

The house also held animals: a Jack Russell terrier named Buddy and talking parrots named Dean and Joan. "The parrots are great," Fisher told Interview. "They repeat all my phone conversations." Joan, she added, "likes to come visit me while I'm in the tub. She sings opera, too."

What happened to the final home?

Fisher moved into her last Hollywood Hills house in 1993 — a home previously owned by King Kong actor Robert Armstrong, then Bette Davis, then costume designer Edith Head. "It was actually my furniture that made the call," she told AD in 2004. "I had so much stuff, I had to live in a place where it wanted to go." The house featured 1930s leather club chairs, folk art, Indian rugs and, for her modern-minded daughter, bubble and egg chairs.

Her guesthouse hosted "the famous and near famous: the well and those in need of healing, addicts, depressives, those being treated for cancer and HIV, those just passing through," she told AD. James Blunt recorded a song in her bathroom, where an upright piano stood for its acoustics. "This is just one of those houses that does things to people," Fisher said.

Fisher died at 60 in December 2016, days after cardiac arrest on a flight; Reynolds died the next day at 84. Their combined 3.5-acre estate listed for $18 million in June 2017, Mansion Global reported. Two months later, Lourd told Town & Country she had decided to keep her mother's house: "It's so magical. It's such a special place. And I'm having a couple of friends move in with me, like an old-style commune."