Starline Tour: Malibu Celebrity Homes Tour

I love doing research for this blog. Writing This Ugly Beautiful City has given me an excuse to explore Los Angeles and do some things I didn’t do as a tourist. Activities like buying a star map or taking a hop-on, hop-off tour of the city. Today I talk about the time I took the Starline Malibu Celebrity Homes Tour in the name of research.

 

Did I miss my chance in being a tourist in L.A.?

As a long-time resident of Los Angeles, I felt like I might have missed my window to be a tourist. If I hadn’t done touristy things by a decade in, did that mean I couldn’t? I wondered if I would find those most popular L.A. activities as exciting now that I lived here. Now that I was a local, was I supposed to be annoyed by them like my fellow Angelenos? Would I find celebrity tours exciting if I could care less about celebrity culture? I needed to enlist a research assistant who loved the tourism and celebrity part of being in Los Angeles to help me find out.

I come from a long line of women who love gossip shows and celebrity news. From my great-grandmother, who watched Old Hollywood movies to learn English, to my mom, who has People Magazine on a lifetime renewal. I needed to wait until one of those women came to town. My willing research assistant was my mother.

We had done all of the Hollywood 101 activities before, and I wanted to level up. I needed to find a way to both explore a new area of L.A. and incorporate the rich and famous. Me being an architecture lover, we settled on Starline’s Malibu Celebrity Homes Tour as it checked a lot of boxes. Plus, it included some time on the beach as part of its itinerary.

Starline Tours

If you aren’t familiar, Starline is a tour company offering driving tours of popular locations, celebrity homes, and hop-on-hop-off tours of Los Angeles. On any given day, you can see its double-decker buses roaming the city, taking tourists to Hollywood and Beverly Hills, stopping for photos at Urban Light.

To give you some added history, It is the oldest celebrity tour company in Los Angeles. It started in 1935 after Sid Grauman, of Grauman’s Chinese Theater gave the idea of driving star-obsessed tourists around Hollywood to his chauffeur. That chauffeur ended up quitting his day job and started Starline. It has grown from those early days of a single limo to a fleet of vehicles zig-zagging the city, studios, and celebrity homes in between.

Departing the pier

The Malibu Celebrity Homes Tour departs from Santa Monica Pier due to its proximity to Malibu. You can find the office across from Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.

Our fellow passengers included a family from Wales and three sassy retirees from Texas, all wearing matching leopard print tops and visors. As we loaded into the ten-passenger van, the guide warned us that only one side of the headsets would be working. Not the best way to start off a tour where one listens to fun facts about the area for two-plus hours.

If you would like to play along, I have added links in the song titles for the California-themed music we heard during the tour.

Queued up for our departure was “Fun, Fun, Fun” by The Beach Boys. I had to hold my hand to my right ear to hear the song better over the wind and traffic noise.

Santa Monica

In Santa Monica, we learned about all of the real estate that former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger owns in the area. Our guide told us that Arnold is usually out and about, but oddly not today. If only we had taken the tour the day before, we would have seen Arnold walking down Ocean Avenue with his son. 

We headed south to the Hotel California, queued up on the tape deck was, of course, “Hotel California” by the Eagles. We then learned that this hotel was actually not the hotel in the song. (Music fact: There is no Hotel California–the song isn’t about staying in a hotel.)

We changed direction and headed north up the Pacific Coast Highway. As soon as you leave the pier area, there are beautiful views of the ocean dotted with multi-million dollar homes. Our guide pointed out our first set of celebrity homes. Late entertainer Bob Hope has houses dotted throughout Southern California, including a beach house he purchased early in his career. This home is close to where Leo Dicaprio and Charlize Theron have homes now. We lingered outside Charlize’s house as our guide talked about the area. He went on and on about how friendly Theron is, especially with the tour companies. He let us know that she would usually come out and say hello but for some reason, not today. If only we were there the day before, she would have been out talking to us. 

Celebrity Stalking

Since we missed our chance to see Charlize, we headed onwards getting more fun facts about the houses on the route. We passed around a binder filled with the houses we were talking about. These included drawings and photos showing their full footprint on the beach.

The above photo is an example. What you see from the Pacific Coast Highway is often garages. The rest of the home stretches hundreds of feet toward the ocean, which you can’t see from the street.

Once we were in a more residential stretch of the PCH, we pulled over to the side of the road. We caught sight of a young man in a wetsuit trying to cross the highway with a surfboard.

The guide whispers into the microphone for our one ear to hear….

“That looks like a Bridges… ummm…maybe Jeff‘s son, or grandson …I haven’t seen him before, but it does look like a Bridges brow line, hmmm… I am not sure.”

It was at that point that I felt more like I was on a safari, especially since I was surrounded by so much leopard print.

As we were unable to discern whether or not he was a Bridges, we started our tour again. My bet was a random guy, but the tour needed some drama.

This part of the drive is actually quite beautiful; to your left is the glistening pacific ocean and twenty-seven miles of beaches. If it were a hop-on, hop-off tour, I would have gotten off and walked The Strand for a while. 

The birthplace of surf

We spotted Duke’s Malibu, a restaurant popular with tourists for its Hawaiian fare and front-row seat to the ocean. It is named after Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, who is said to have brought surfing to Los Angeles from Hawaii. 

As soon as our tour guide finished giving us that fun fact, I knew what was coming. I elbowed my mother and said, “I bet you $50, the next song is “Wipeout,” and it came blasting loudly in the one ear of our headsets.

Malibu is the land surf beaches and celebrity beachfront property. Just past Malibu Surf Beach is where Matthew “I don’t like shirts” McConaughey, Pamela Anderson, and Sting have homes. These houses are next to Malibu Lagoon, so we couldn’t pull up and get close. You know, in case they happened to be out that day.

Queue the “Baywatch” theme song on the tape deck.

Further north, past the gorgeously tiled Adamson House and Malibu Lagoon Museum, is another stretch of celebrity homes. Many of the properties come as close to the ocean as legally allowed.

We were able to get a closer view of these homes when we got our ten minutes of beach time. It felt short, but we still had the rest of the tour to do before heading back to the Santa Monica Pier.

We hit the last of the homes just south of Paradise Cove. Taking a beach frontage road, we hovered outside Adam Sandler’s house, who is very nice and will come out to sign autographs, but of course, you guessed it, not today.

At a certain point, every time a celebrity was mentioned, my mom and I burst into giggles because we knew what was coming.  “If only you were here yesterday….” I think we had fun with it, but I think the family from Wales was bummed.

We headed back, remembering where California Surf was born, Matthew McConaughy lived, and with the hope that Charlize had returned for the day so she could come out and shake our hands.

Hours, cost, and other information

• Website: https://www.starlinetours.com/en
• Tour: https://www.starlinetours.com/en/malibu-stars-homes
• Cost: $65 for adults, $55 for kids
• Other: This tour is only offered on the weekends

My verdict is that it is never too late to be a tourist in your own city.

I hope that these 70+ posts, including the Malibu Celebrity Homes Tour, give you some ideas for what to do in Los Angeles. That might mean a future trip once we can move about the world again or ideas for Angelenos to get to know Los Angeles better. I love being a tourist in my own city and I hope that what I have written has inspired you to do the same.

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