For her first sit-down interview in over a year, Ellen DeGeneres discussed her passion for home renovation, design, and real estate with The Riv magazine as their spring cover star. The magazine reported that DeGeneres has personally bought and sold over 50 homes and estates in the Southern California area. Her extensive real estate portfolio has kept the comedian plenty busy, even with her syndicated talk show having wrapped up last year after a 19-year run, which netted over 60 Daytime Emmys. DeGeneres revealed some background into her housing situation growing up, providing a possible origin story for her homemaking obsession: “We were always moving. We never owned. I always thought we were looking for just the right house and hadn’t found it yet,” she explained to writer Les Firestein. “I didn’t realize we were poor and were never going to buy a place. I think my folks took us to open house caravans just for the veggie tray.” In her post-talk show life, it seems she’s certainly well positioned to dive further into homemaking programming, if she feels so inclined.
When asked about how much wife Portia de Rossi weighs in on her home design projects, DeGeneres shared that the actor isn’t too concerned with her partner’s house flipping hustle. “We don’t delve into each other’s silos,” she said of her wife, a passionate equestrian. “In fact, I can’t really get her to go into a furniture store with me. Unless there’s a horse in there somewhere.”
DeGeneres takes extra measures to make sure her project timelines stay tidy. With all the resources at her fingertips to get the work done, she estimates she takes about one third of the time most people might once she’s zeroed in on a new house. The comedian’s contractor shared that working on an “Ellen house” requires an all-hands-on-deck mentality—sometimes hundreds of hands on a single project. “For speed of construction, there’s a number of strategies we deploy. One is, of course, sheer human power—what other contractors refer to as ‘bodies on sight,’” said Lance Lentz, who has worked with DeGeneres for 30 years. “And, yes, I’ve been known to deploy 700 men simultaneously on a single job.”
After a DeGeneres-led reimagining of a historic Montecito mansion, Ariana Grande snapped up the Tudor-style estate for $6.75 million in June 2020. The pop star wed real estate agent Dalton Gomez in a May 2021 private ceremony at the residence. It’s known as the Porter House and was originally constructed in Surrey, England, before being dismantled and relocated to California.
Kurt Rappaport, DeGeneres’s longtime real estate agent, recalled a time when the comedian was circling a certain project but had it “scooped out from under her” by a developer before she’d had the chance to put in an offer. Distraught, she and Rappaport contacted the developer long before he had finished work on the house because she “couldn’t take the desecration.” Rappaport went on to explain that she ended up buying the house to put an end to the overhaul: “She took it over and said to the developer, ‘You can’t do a fricking thing to this house anymore. Put down your tools, I’m paying you to stop today.’” Following through on her emotional and financial investment in the property, the comedian “restored it immaculately.”
DeGeneres prefers to work with the existing blueprint of a residence, infusing her own flair into the structure rather than beginning at square one. Because of her need for “instant gratification and the adrenaline rush,” she sticks to flipping and doesn’t build new. “That year and a half in planning would be lethal to me,” she said. “I can’t sit still that long, no matter how nice the chair is.” The Hollywood legend and home flipper always makes sure to preserve at least a single piece as a nod to the prior lives of her projects—“an homage,” she calls it.
