Inside Hollywood legend James Cagney’s picturesque Beverly Hills estate

Just over 100 years ago, the new neighbourhood of Beverly Hills was mostly open ranch land, dirt tracks and citrus groves. As Hollywood stepped into its Golden Age, the sparse yet upmarket enclave began to attract movie stars, directors and producers, with its population rising from 634 in 1920 to 17,429 in 1930.

One of these Hollywood types was Oscar-winning actor James Cagney (1899-1986), who established his five-acre estate in Beverly Hills beneath Franklin Canyon in the 1930s. Between starring in celebrated crime films such as The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), he retreated into the private world of his sprawling European-style countryside home, his very own village of leisure and creativity immersed in nature.

‘Cagney played the most well-known gangster characters, yet the antithesis of his real life to me is so intriguing,’ says Timothy Di Prizito, CEO of Di Prizito Associates & Luxury Estates Director at Christie's International Real Estate Southern California, who is co-listing the estate alongside Aaron Kirman, CEO of Christie's International Real Estate Southern California. Cagney spent his early career singing and dancing in Vaudeville and was also a painter and extremely well-read with a vast library, Di Prizito explains.

His painting studio and carriage house with trussed beams of 19th century French oak were connected to the house by stone pathways and courtyard gardens. Today, the house and these residences together host seven bathrooms and eight bedrooms over their approximately 10,700 square feet, creating a picturesque compound ideal for all kinds of artists with production or fitness studios and home offices, as well as for multigenerational family life.

Amongst his diverse portfolio, Di Prizito has worked on numerous, historic, multi-acre estates, from Vincent Price’s former residence in Holmby Hills, to a preeminent 1917 Montecito estate of a famous American novelist. He’s recently noticed a younger, ultra-high-net-worth generation showing new appreciation for the authentic, natural materials used in these homes, as well as their cosy, liveable interiors that conjure intimacy, even when entertaining at scale.

The rich patina and warmth of the James Cagney estate has been exquisitely restored over many years. The house flows effortlessly from the wine cellar to kitchen, then to the formal dining room, past original fireplaces, and outside to the shaded terraces, cedar shingled facades and terracotta roofs. ‘Clients are looking for deeper, more meaningful relationships to home, which is why storied, legacy homes are more attractive now than ever,’ Di Prizito says.

As well as their history, these kinds of estates are highly valued for their large, mature acreage. It was as early as the 1950s, with the advent of television and the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, that Beverly Hills’ original expansive estates began to be distributed into smaller lots, as the late Jeffrey Hyland wrote in The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills. Today, a five-acre estate like Cagney’s — secretly embedded into the canyon, where wild deer, birds and rabbits roam — just a five-minute drive to downtown Beverly Hills and the Los Angeles metropolis beyond, is even more rare.

With just the right amount of wilderness, the low-maintenance landscaped gardens of the Cagney estate offer elegant hardscaping, a regulation tennis court, a pickleball court, a half basketball court, a resort-style swimming pool, lawns and an outdoor chef’s kitchen perfect for hosting outdoors. Here, Cagney spent private time with friends surrounded by nature in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, yet could conveniently step into the limelight, attend award shows and travel to movie sets when duty called.

Cagney’s estate represents a personal and peaceful type of home lifestyle that Di Prizito has noticed celebrities being drawn back to, following a period of intense over-exposure driven by social media. It seems that nearly 100 years later — after social revolutions, technological inventions and dramatic urban change — there’s some qualities to home life, including nature and creativity, that continue to appeal to our humanity and are perhaps becoming even more important antidotes to the lives we lead today.