There are certain signifiers in the richest neighborhoods of coastal regions. Large shrubs. Maintenance men. G-Wagons or Range Rovers. There are also many things missing. Strangers. Sidewalks. Any kind of pseudo-public space. Ross, an enclave in Marin County, hits all these notes. It is the perfect town for Northern California’s ultra-wealthy. It’s also rumored to be the new home of Lady Gaga.
Calling it a rumor may not be doing it justice. Unlike Los Angeles and New York City, where celebrities are everywhere, the Bay Area isn’t used to residents of Gaga’s stature. We have absolutely no chill about it.
That Lady Gaga may now be living in Ross (or close enough) is the talk of Marin. Her fiance, Michael Polansky, a venture capitalist, is from the area and often shows up in paparazzi shots wearing a Marin trucker hat. So it’s no surprise that in recent years, she’s been spotted around the Bay. Over the last few months, however, tips started pouring into the newsroom that Gaga had chosen the north bay as her new home. Look into this, the tipsters pleaded. Is it true? Is the pop star/actor/entrepreneur/economy-unto-herself living among us?
How could we not investigate?
It didn’t take much digging to find people who have not only seen Lady Gaga around but are certain she now lives in the area. Exactly where is everyone’s question. Employees at the Marin Country Mart — which, much like its cousins the Brentwood Country Mart, the Malibu Country Mart, and the Montecito Country Mart, is not very country, doesn’t have a market, and is mostly a facsimile enjoyed by the wealthy — have seen Lady Gaga frequently.
In one shop at the Marin Country Mart, two employees quickly agreed that Gaga is a resident. They disagreed only over whether she lives in Ross or Mill Valley. “That’s where he’s from,” one said of Polansky’s roots in Mill Valley. According to online records, he indeed owns a modest home there. Another employee described them both as “locals” but did not know where exactly they live. Yet another agreed that Gaga’s residence in the area is “an open secret.” All of these employees had seen the couple and spoken to others who had as well.
“They come around, but no one bothers them,” one of the employees added, noting that the couple always have what appears to be security in tow. “It’s kind of like, wink-wink, you know?”
Tipsters repeatedly floated one home — pardon me, estate — as a possibility. Online sleuthing suggests they are onto something: The home is palatial enough for the likes of Lady Gaga, who is reportedly worth $900 million, and the most recent known residents appear to have moved. Although the property has not recorded a sale transaction and ownership is hidden behind an LLC, it was on the market before the listing was removed. It’s possible for the recording of an off-market home sale to be delayed or, in some cases, not recorded at all. A lease agreement would never be made public.
The Standard will not reveal the address of any homes associated with the couple. But I did go to check it out for myself. And for you.
The home has a rustic yet modern design, with a beige stone exterior, maybe sandstone or quartzite. On a lot of more than five acres, among the largest in Ross, is the main single-family residence of more than 17,000 square feet, a poolhouse, and a “caretaker residence.” The house has no mailbox, but that’s because no one in Ross does. The town does not allow traditional mail delivery, so everyone must have a P.O. box at the post office. There is no stated reason for this, but one local real estate agent said it’s simply because a Ross resident long ago decided that “mailboxes are ugly.”
Most of this information about the property comes from lengthy planning materials submitted a couple of years ago to the city of Ross for the addition of a standalone 728-square-foot “art studio.” Something rich communities like is long, arduous building reviews and permitting processes that make construction of anything new as difficult and expensive as possible, if not impossible. Ross goes so far as to dictate the materials and colors homeowners should select.
Decades ago, much of Marin County was expected to be more of a direct extension of San Francisco’s growing population. There was even a northern extension of BART planned. Advertising was created to depict this strange, futuristic realm of convenience and public services heading north.
Instead, the region became a paragon of NIMBYism, maintaining the lowest density of any county around San Francisco. On more than 500 square miles of land, only 260,000 people reside. Just across the water, about 900,000 people live on the 49 square miles that make up San Francisco County. Many of the towns within Marin (Ross, Kentfield, Point Reyes, Tiburon, Sausalito, Bolinas, Larkspur) are even less populated than Malibu — the original refuge for L.A.’s rich and famous who needed an oceanfront escape, and where Lady Gaga has called a large, Spanish-style estate her main home for several years.
Maybe that’s why she (reportedly) headed north, looking for even fewer people around and the privacy offered by a place that so openly caters to wealth and not much else. There are no public beaches near Ross. There isn’t even a grocery store.
Much like Gaga’s Malibu property, her rumored new estate is not really visible from the street. And believe me, I tried to see it. Several times. A partial rear facade with no windows is all that can be seen behind a tall service gate. There was a luxury SUV parked there when I visited. The rest was hidden by shrubbery.
You’re probably thinking, I’m glad you couldn’t see anything! Lady Gaga deserves her privacy! Get a life! You call this journalism? I see your (imaginary) point, but then again, why did you read this far? Because you’re curious. See, we’re the same.
Austin Klar, a real estate agent in the Bay Area who has worked on real estate transactions throughout Marin, said the hidden aspect to the homes there is yet another of the town’s building requirements. Houses usually have to be set back from the road, and structures can take up only 15% of the lot.
“There is a lot of privacy, and the lots are large, like stretches of the Hamptons, but the weather is a microclimate that rivals parts of Orange County,” Klar said. “It’s absolutely where someone looking for more privacy would go in Marin. It’s a very luxurious, pleasant, but yes, pretty closed-off environment.”
I referred to Ross as “hermetically sealed,” prompting Klar to respond with the nicer phrase. As I drove several times around Ross — it’s very small — I strained to find even a couple of visual features to describe the estate where Lady Gaga may or may not live. This is also by Ross’ design. The town prefers homes that are “high quality,” “muted,” and generally “avoid conflicts with the natural setting of the structure.”
The house I drove over a bridge to see is surrounded by other homes that are also very private and valued online at $20 million or more. They all sit behind large gates and are further secluded by trees and foliage. Privacy achieved.
Surely this place, so devoid of personality, a flat expression of social class, is not where Mother Monster, who writes lyrics like ‘I’m obsessively opposed to the typical,’ would choose to spend tens of millions of dollars to live, day in, day out?
During my visit, I did not see Lady Gaga. Requests for confirmation that she lives in Ross went unanswered by her team. Perhaps that’s exactly why she would pick this town as home. Or perhaps the rumors are just that.
There is a “downtown” in Ross. If you’ve been, or ever visit, you’ll get that joke. Most of it was closed or devoid of people when I was there around midday on a Friday. It was around this time that it dawned on me: I was hitting this town’s immune response to a foreign body. Every turn I took seemed to be forcing me around, out, goodbye.
Suddenly desperate to be among people who work for a living, I turned to the Country Mart. On the 10-minute drive there from Ross — down the main road named for Sir Francis Drake, an English “privateer” and one of that country’s earliest slave traders — I thought about how odd it would be for a woman like Gaga, who became famous as a bisexual, meat-wearing, pop-performance artist, to live behind such a veneer of bland, small-town aesthetics. Surely this place, so devoid of personality, a flat expression of social class, is not where Mother Monster, who writes lyrics like “I’m obsessively opposed to the typical,” would choose to spend tens of millions of dollars to live, day in, day out?
I could certainly be wrong. I also thought it would be difficult to get people to talk about whether they’d seen Gaga around — very wrong. People were even willing to discuss other extremely famous people deemed to be new or returning locals. Did I know that Zendaya and her fiance Tom Holland just bought a place in Tiburon? Did I know that Julia Roberts just moved to a new place in Pacific Heights? I did not!
Turns out that even a facsimile of a small town does maintain one core characteristic of the real thing: local gossip.