Cate Blanchett's $4.5 million English home with a storied past was once an abandoned manor | HELLO! (2025)

Cate Blanchett has had a lot of places to call home, but her current residence might be the most special — and most storied.

The Black Bag actress is originally from Ivanhoe, Australia, and since 1997 has been married to esteemed Australian playwright Andrew Upton, with whom she shares four kids, sons Dashiell, 23, Roman, 20, and Ignatius, 17, as well as daughter Edith, 10.

And though they have as a couple and later family lived in several different homes and apartments across both Australia and the UK, these days, it's an epic $4.5 million English manor that they reportedly call home.

All about the home

The English manor that Cate, Andrew and the children call home is called Highwell House, and is located near Crowborough in the countryside of East Sussex, where fellow stars such as Kate Winslet and Paul McCartney's ex-wife Heather Mills have also lived or live.

The Victorian era home sits on 13 acres of land, and boasts a whopping 9,028 square feet, was built in 1890, and previously belonged to Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Per Architectural Digest, the main house features seven bedrooms, eight full bathrooms, and two half bathrooms, as well as five reception rooms, plus, there are also about a dozen antique fireplaces, a games room, and even a 40-foot drawing room adorned with multiple crystal chandeliers.

Harper's Bazaar also reported that shortly after Cate bought the home, she won planning permission to create a new building on the property complete with a studio and meditation room, and moreover hoped to use the space to house some of her art collection.

The manor had been abandoned

Cate's English manor has been on an architectural rollercoaster, and in between its beginnings as a Victorian mansion and the beautifully restored home it is today, it fell into such despair, per the Daily Mail, it became a dilapidated squat house with building debris, broken furniture, smashed glass and drug paraphernalia. The home was riddled with graffiti, including of Pentagram symbols, often used as part of Wiccan ceremonies, and ripped up wallpaper.

The outlet further reported that prior to Cate and Andrew, it was owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Walford, though it was abandoned for about a decade before it was restored and put on the market. "We're just pleased the place is occupied now for years it was derelict and we were getting all sorts of people up there, druggies," a local previously told The Daily Telegraph when Cate purchased the home, adding: "[There] were burglars that were taking their loot there and splitting it up at one stage in the old barn."

Cate and Andrew's other homes

Cate and Andrew have bought and purchased a handful of other homes in their nearly 30 years together, per AD.

They previously lived in a four-story Georgian home on the Brighton seafront for nearly a decade, before moving back to Sydney, where they bought a circa-1877 Gothic-style mansion in Hunters Hill for around $6.5 million, which they sold in 2017.

In 2019 they also listed a luxury island retreat in the Republic of Vanuatu, which is located between Fiji and Australia, called Matanara, which they bought in 2011, and in 2014, they bought a three-story holiday home near Berowra Creek, which they sold in 2019.