The Tortured Poets Department: Inside the Homes of All the People Taylor Swift Mentions on the Album

Photo: Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management

Taylor Swift is as known for her literary and historical references as she is for her music, love life, and celebrity feuds, and her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, doesn’t let us down. While many fans are scouring the lyrics for references to ex-boyfriends Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy, the 31-song double album contains callouts to everyone from silent-movie stars to a subtle jab at Kim Kardashian.

Here’s our roundup of the stars referenced in the already record-breaking album and a look at the buildings that shaped them:

Clara Bow: A notorious Beverly Hills mansion

The original It girl, Brooklyn-born Clara Bow was one of the rare silent movie stars who successfully made the move into talkies. An icon of the 1920s, she was probably as famous at the height of her career as Swift is today—no wonder she gets one of the album’s best songs named after her. Known for her scandalous love life and fashion sense as much as for her work, Bow was incredibly productive, making 57 films in just 10 years. Sound familiar? Bow’s Beverly Hills mansion was allegedly the site of drug-fueled orgies, but these were rumors spread by a tabloid publisher who was blackmailing her and ended up jailed for eight years over it. The four-bedroom house itself was once described as “exactly the place you would expect a flapper to live,” and AD explored the home and its infamous inhabitant in a 1994 issue.

Dylan Thomas: A boathouse in Wales and the Hotel Chelsea

“You’re not Dylan Thomas,” Swift sings on the title track. “I’m not Patti Smith. This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel. We’re modern idiots.” Thomas, a poet and playwright, was one of many artists and musicians drawn to Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea, which had a stunning redbrick façade but was crumbling and decaying inside during its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s. It was there that he died in 1953 after a stroke, at just 39 years of age. Before that, he raised his children in a cliff-set home known as The Boathouse, where at least some of his famous play Under Milk Wood was written. AD took a look at the poet’s last family home (now a museum) in a 1993 print feature.

Patti Smith: “Aggressively Seedy” town houses and a French poet’s home

One of the most significant punk rock musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries, Smith is one of the Hotel Chelsea’s most famous residents. She praised its “shabby elegance, and the history it held so possessively.” Smith lived in room 1017, the smallest in the hotel, with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, paying just $55 per night at the time. They were in a romantic relationship, despite the fact that Mapplethorpe was gay, and Smith immortalized their bond—including their time at the Hotel Chelsea—in her memoir Just Kids. She spoke up in defense of Swift in 2019, saying, “I’m sure that she’s trying to do something good.” It must have stuck with Swift, because Smith also gets another shout out in the track “loml” with the lyric “We were just kids, babe.” She and Mapplethorpe also lived in an “aggressively seedy” New York town house before his death. Now an established (if never Establishment) musician and artist, Smith purchased the home of French poet Arthur Rimbaud in 2017.

Charlie Puth: Midcentury-modern Beverly Hills mansion

In the same song in which she references Thomas and Smith, Swift sings that “Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist,” and it’s hard to disagree. Then again, the midcentury-modern mansion in Beverly Hills he listed for $17 million after buying it for $9 million suggests he’s not doing too badly. But it was his luxurious Hollywood Hills bachelor pad that saw him pen platinum albums Nine-Track Mind and Voicenotes. His songs may have focused on breakups and unrequited love, but there are worse places to have a broken heart than a five-bedroom marble-outfitted villa with a wine room, an outdoor pool, and a steam sauna.

Stevie Nicks: A trailer park and a shawl vault

It’s no surprise that the poster girl for eccentric bohemia used to live in a mobile home—although the exclusive Malibu trailer park Paradise Cove isn’t exactly down at heel. Known as the priciest trailer park in America, the site offers sweeping ocean views over the bluffs and includes its own tennis court and a private beach. Nicks is believed to have purchased the trailer for $4 million, and monthly rates at Paradise Cove can be more than $4,000 per month. She sold the trailer in 2016—possibly because it couldn’t accommodate the shawl vault she built in her next home, where her iconic fringed accessories are stored in a temperature-controlled environment.

Nancy Mitford: Paris, Oxfordshire, and Heywood Hill bookshop

Bonus track “The Bolter” spins a tale about a woman who is as hard to pin down as she is charming. She falls in love again and again, “But it always ends up with a town car speeding out the drive one evening.” The nickname comes from a character in Nancy Mitford’s In Pursuit of Love, who abandons her daughter, the novel’s narrator, in favor of a series of lovers. Although Mitford lived everywhere from Oxfordshire to Paris, it’s her time as a bookseller at Heywood Hill during World War II that has made the biggest impact, making the bookshop a destination for her fans.

Taylor Swift: “The house by the Heath”

Swift isn’t afraid to be her own muse, and even gives herself a shout-out by name in “Clara Bow.” From the Christmas tree farm she grew up on to Cornelia Street in New York City and the Rhode Island house in Folklore’s “the last great american dynasty,” home is at the heart of many of her songs. Maybe that’s why her new track “So Long, London” stings so hard—not only is it the companion to the landmark-littered song “London Boy” on her album Lover, but it even references the $8.7 million house overlooking Hampstead Heath that she rented with Alwyn.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest

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