A Bay Area farm with a storied history is on the market, courtesy of famed celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. She bought the Bolina farm compound, dubbed “the Hideaway,” in 2019. The 65-acre property, priced just shy of $9 million, encompasses seven structures. Four are residential, including a light-filled four-bedroom main house from the 1920s, a two-bedroom caretaker’s home, and a guest cottage that also offers a workshop. Two barns have been converted for entertaining. There’s also a functional seven-stall stable with offices, and there’s plenty of fertile land.

“We planned to partner with a legendary farmer over the hill to bring the place back to its former self as a working and teaching farm,” Leibovitz said, adding that this precise location boasts the ideal microclimate to grow crops in all four seasons. That means it’s temperate enough to use the expansive horseback riding arena year round, too.

The Hideaway in Bolinas, CA. Photo: Jacob Elliott

Leibovitz acquired the property for $7.5 million when one of her daughters was considering college in the Bay Area. The Wall Street Journal calls Bolinas, 13 miles north of San Francisco, “a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley.” Investors Michael Moritz and John Osterweis live there, as have chef Alice Waters and Third Eye Blind frontman Stephan Jenkins. Local lore has it that residents sometimes remove directional signs to protect their haven. Leibovitz has often dreamt of returning to the coast where she first learned her craft, but her daughters all ended up going to school in the Northeast. Leibovitz notably sold her newly empty Upper West Side nest last Fall.

The kitchen at the Hideaway. Photo: Jacob Elliott.

Although she never lived in Bolinas, Leibovitz did invest $2 million into “infrastructure renovations” like a new kitchen for the main house—as well as “beautiful stone planting terraces for farming,” said real estate agent Alexander Fromm Lurie, alongside new irrigation and drainage. She purportedly took care to retain the Hideaway’s original character, even protecting an old rotary phone on the wall.

A bedroom in the Hideaway. Photo: Jacob Elliott.

And Leibovitz isn’t even the first famous person to figure in the property’s history. Fellow photography legend Ansel Adams passed through the Hideaway in the 1930s and snapped a photo of the elegant weathered milking barn which later toured America as part of his Smithsonian show “The Eloquent Light” in 1963. The Hideaway’s site said its heritage dates back to the “original settlers” of Bolinas—a tiny town that has passed through many hands, whose name itself is a bastardized version of the original, indigenous Miwok title for it.

The converted hay barn. Photo: Jacob Elliott.

Leibovitz bought the property from the caretakers of the late famed San Francisco financier Warren Hellman, who founded the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival and transformed the property into a pastoral, musical getaway. He added a recording studio to the dairy barn and turned the spacious hay barn into an event hall.

But the property’s best feature remains the land itself. The Hideaway sits precisely “where the Pacific Ocean and Mt. Tamalpais meet,” as the listing put it, offering idyllic surfing, sensational sunrises, and lush hills along the Bolinas Lagoon’s northernmost coast.