Fashions worn by Diane Keaton, from left, at the 65th Annual Academy Awards in 1993, at the Ralph Lauren Spring/Summer 2024 fashion show, at the AFI Life Achievement Award Tribute in her honor in 2017, at the Los Angeles premiere of "Mack and Rita" in 2022, and at the David Donatello awards ceremony in Rome in 2018.Β 

 Associated Press

Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton β€œhad a thing for Tucson, Arizona,” as USA Today described it in a 2018 article.

β€œI just love Tucson,” Keaton, who died Saturday in California at age 79, told Jimmy Kimmel on his show in May of 2018.

β€œI bought a barrio property there, and I’m really excited,” she shared with Kimmel. β€œI’m going to redo that and fix the adobe.”

β€œTucson is underappreciated,” she said.

If that was so, it no longer was, perhaps β€” at least in real estate terms β€” when Keaton was through flipping the historic home in Barrio Viejo, which dated to at least the 1880s.

She sold it for $2.2 million in 2021 β€” after buying it for $1.5 million three years earlier. She did end up getting less than her $2.6 million asking price, though.

Even $1.5 million was an eye-popping number for the historic neighborhood at the time, the Arizona Daily Star reported when Keaton paid cash β€” $328 per square foot β€” for the adobe row home in 2018.

Diane Keaton in 2018, the year she bought a Tucson investment home when she was 72.

Keaton was β€œgracious” and striking, wearing her glasses and 4-inch heels, when she first came to visit the property, its previous owner told the Star at the time.

Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton’s former property on South Convent Avenue in Tucson’s Barrio Viejo.

The actress was β€œan interior designer in her own right, known for her quintessential design aesthetic,” said realtors representing the buyer when Keaton sold the home in 2021, after she renovated the interior and added a pool and upgraded landscaping.

Or, as Realtor.com put it in a headline, “Diane Keaton gives a glow-up to a desert delight in Tucson.”

Keaton’s love for fixing up and selling historic homes was well chronicled, and she had been scoping out Tucson for years.

The almost-4,600-square-foot home on Convent Avenue as it looked when Keaton listed it in 2020.

Keaton and her sister, Dorrie Hall, have also been listed in property records as owners of a home in historic Tubac, south of Tucson.

Not all of Keaton’s renovations here got rave reviews, however.

She was cited by the city of Tucson in October 2020, the Star reported, for adding new decorative light fixtures and 17 roof water spouts known as canales to the front of the barrio house without prior approval.

Those violations were resolved when the Barrio Historico Historic Zone Advisory Board told her she could keep the lights but forced her to remove at least seven of the fake canales and make the remaining ones functional.

Diane Keaton, the Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather films, died Saturday at the age of 79, according to U.S. media reports. Entertainment journalist Johanna Schneller remembers Keaton as 'feisty and funny': 'She had an oddness to her but she also managed to be a sort of everywoman.'

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