Some men buy houses. Cary Grant bought vantage points. He didn’t so much acquire real estate as select his role in the landscape. When he purchased the Beverly Hills estate in 1946—a year after V-J Day, at the precise hour America began to believe in leisure again—it was not yet the stuccoed Xanadu it would later become. It was a low-roofed, badly-planned, vaguely Italianate nothing. But it sat high enough above Benedict Canyon to remind an Englishman of the distant abstraction of empire. This was a house not of now, but of future possibility.

Grant, born Archibald Leach in the soot-soaked tenements of Bristol, understood artifice better than anyone in the city of illusions. He had spent his life remaking himself, each iteration closer to the man the world expected. He was not interested in comfort, per se. He was interested in control.

So he had the ceilings raised. The walls reoriented. The views from the master suite recalibrated to catch the last slit of Pacific light. The estate became a cinematic set for domesticity: hedges pruned into formality, interiors stripped of clutter, all clean lines and latent performance. He didn’t live in it so much as occupy it with careful precision.

This was the home he shared with his fourth wife, Barbara Harris—35 years his junior and, by all accounts, more interested in the Cary Grant behind closed doors than the one smiling on a Columbia backlot. She later described their life there as “happily cloistered,” though no cloister had quite such guests. There was, for instance, the night of her surprise birthday party when Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck—having forgotten the code for the new wrought-iron gate—simply crawled through the shrubbery and in through a window. The house, so elegant in daylight, became a playground for mid-century America’s demi-gods after dark.

At the time of purchase, Grant had just come off a streak of films that cemented his double identity: Arsenic and Old Lace, None But the Lonely Heart, and soon after, Notorious. These were roles that blurred the line between menace and suavity, between clown and gentleman. It’s tempting to think the house shared something of that ambiguity. It was beautiful, but never soft. It offered comfort, but not indulgence.