Succession is back, baby, and season 4 opened with a bang of stealth wealth à la Kendall’s unmarked baseball cap, sprawling vistas that are ignored in lieu of furious phone calls and secretive huddles, and enough creative uses of the word “fuck” to power a small country. In the season 4 premiere, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin) have maintained last season’s fragile alliance and fly from one stunning Santa Monica strategy nest to Nan Pierce’s California home in an attempt to convince her to sell legacy media company PGM to them instead of to their father, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). Amid the intense negotiating taking place, Shiv at least still took a moment to compliment Nan (Cherry Jones) on the exquisite estate—the filming location of which has since been identified as a $30 million California mansion belonging to a former tech CEO.
Twitter user @kristytipsy identified the location shown as Nan Pierce’s home on the show as the Peabody Estate in Santa Barbara, also known as Villa Solana. The estate, built in 1914 by architect Francis T. Underhill and exec Frederick Forrest Peabody, was formerly home to the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions think tank, visited by leaders like John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger during its years of operation from 1958 to 1978.
In 2020, the property was sold to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, per the Wall Street Journal, for the price of $30.8 million—well below the $57.5 million it was listed for in 2012. The property includes 11 acres of land sitting on a hilltop with magnificent ocean and mountain views, and the grounds are a lush collection of palm trees, lemon trees, pomegranate trees, and more. The 22,000-square-foot main house comes in at five bedrooms and includes unique design touches like 17th-century French oak paneling and white Alabama marble; there’s also a separate guest house.
Santa Barbara is currently home to celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Gwyneth Paltrow, and, of course, the fictional Nan Pierce. With new Succession episodes every Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO Max, we’re sure the parade of luxury real estate on our screens has only just begun.
