Barbra Streisand once owned a private valley in Malibu, with five houses, a creek she had moved about 100 yards to make room for a lawn, and a price tag nobody would pay. So in 1993 she gave the whole 22.5-acre estate away to a California state conservation agency, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.
The story is more than three decades old, but it is making the rounds again this week. Here is how a superstar’s hideaway at the end of Ramirez Canyon Road became a public park, and why the gift turned out to be more complicated than it looked.
How 7 acres became 22
It started small. The original lot was about 7 acres, with a single house known as the Barn, home to Jon Peters, then a hairstylist. Streisand moved in with Peters in 1974. Over the following years the couple turned a stable into what became the Peach House and bought three neighboring properties, adding roughly 15 acres.
That is 7 plus 15, or about 22 acres, the figure later recorded as 22.5 acres when the land passed to the state. By then it held five homes, gardens, orchards, a pool, a tennis court, meadows and a stream lined with sycamores. One bungalow had been reworked into a semi-treehouse office. An art deco house was filled with Bakelite pieces.
The sale that never happened
By the late 1980s, Streisand and Peters had split, and she listed the estate for $19 million. It did not sell.
Instead, in 1993 she handed it to the Conservancy, a state agency that buys land for open space and runs environmental education. The property was valued at $15 million, and the donation came with a tax write-off of that size. Set against the $19 million asking price, that is a $4 million gap between what she hoped to get and what the gift was worth on paper.
Streisand’s plan was ambitious. The site was renamed the Barbra Streisand Center for Conservancy Studies and was meant to host what she later described as “a state-of-the-art Environmental Conference and Study Center.”
Key dates
- 1974: Streisand moves into the original 7-acre property.
- Late 1980s: the expanded estate is listed for $19 million and fails to sell.
- 1993: donated to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, valued at $15 million.
- 2009: renamed Ramirez Canyon Park.
- 2011: the state proposes selling it to help close a budget gap.
- 2015: a public access trail from Kanan Dume Road is approved.
- 2018: the Peach House is destroyed in the California wildfires, while four other buildings survive.
A gift with running costs
The donation did not include money for upkeep, and by 2002 the estate cost about $160,000 a year to maintain. To cover that, the Conservancy ran paid tours and rented the grounds for weddings, photo shoots and filming.
The neighbors on the narrow private road objected to the traffic. Tours were cut back to Wednesdays only, with carpooling required and a cap of 40 round trips a day. Guides were told to steer clear of Streisand’s personal life and talk about the houses instead. Somewhere along the way, her name came off the sign.
In May 2011, Governor Jerry Brown put the park on a list of state properties to sell. The Conservancy opposed the plan. Streisand did not. “I understand Governor Brown’s tough decision given the severe budget shortfalls that California is facing,” she said in a statement, adding that she hoped any buyer “will preserve its special habitat.”
What is there now
The sale never went through. The estate is still a state-owned park run by the Conservancy, open to the public but only by appointment, because of the restricted road access. Trails have been planned to link it to the nearby Escondido Canyon and Corral Canyon parks. In December 2026 it will be 33 years since Streisand gave it away.
Further reading
Image: lifescript, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
