Privacy-safe celebrity maps: an updated reference for 2027

A map of where people live is a list of targets with the geography filled in. This site does not make one, will not host one, and treats the near misses as the same thing: a district plus a description, a street with the number withheld, a photograph of a gate. What it makes instead is a map of buildings, and the purpose of this page is to specify what that map contains, how a place earns a pin, and what stays off no matter how easy it would be to add.

The distinction that does the work is between a place and a person. A place that publishes its own location, opens its doors on a schedule and would be unchanged if everyone associated with it left tomorrow is a place. Anything else is a person's home, and a person's home is not architecture writing.

What to take away

• A pin has to pass four tests: the place publishes its own location, it is open or fully public, the entry describes a building not a household, and the entry would survive a change of occupant.
• The map is organized in layers of urban form, building type, era, material and public viewpoint. Names are not a layer.
• Ticketed historic houses are institutions and are described only from what the institution itself publishes.

The four tests

Every entry on a privacy-safe map must answer yes to all four. One no is enough to exclude it.

Does the place publish its own location? Museums, house museums, civic buildings, parks, churches and protected streets do. Their address is part of how they operate. A private house does not, and the fact that its location can be found is not the same as its being published by the place itself.

Is it open to the public, or entirely a public object? A ticketed house, a library, a town hall: open. A square, a terrace, a street of houses read as a group: public objects, because the subject is the ensemble and nobody's front door in particular. A single private house on that street: neither.

Does the entry describe a building or a household? Write the entry, then remove every reference to who is or was associated with the place. If the entry still stands, it is about a building. If it collapses, it was about a person with a building as a pretext.

Would the entry be unchanged if the occupant changed? This is the test the others reduce to. An institution's entry survives a change of director. A protected terrace's entry survives everyone on it moving out. A private house's entry does not, because its occupant was the point.

What the layers are

A map that is not organized by ownership has to be organized by something else, and the something else is better.

Layer	What it shows	Where it comes from
Urban form	Grid, block size, alleys, contour streets; where flat land ends	Public planning maps and the street itself
Building type	Row house, detached, hillside, courtyard, apartment block	Observation from public ground
Era	Which decades built which districts, read from street pattern and construction	Historic map series, designation records
Material and construction	Masonry or frame, roof form, wall finish, the regional default	Observation, survey archives
Protection	Designated buildings and areas, and what the designation covers	The heritage body's public register
Institutions	Houses and buildings that admit the public, with their own published details	The institution's own site, checked on the day
Public viewpoints	Parks, overlooks, bridges and streets from which a district or a skyline can be read	Public access maps

Read together, these layers answer the questions a visitor actually has: what am I looking at, why is it shaped like this, when was it built, what is it made of, and where can I stand to see it. The layer people expect, who lives where, answers none of those.

Protection registers, and why they are public

Designation records are the one category of building-level public information that this map uses freely, and the reason is instructive. A statutory register lists buildings and districts that a public body has decided to protect, and the protection binds whoever owns the building. Because it binds any owner, it has to be public, and because it is about the building and not the owner, it can be. The federal version of that principle is set out plainly by the National Park Service in its explanation of what the National Register of Historic Places is, and state and local bodies keep registers on the same logic. How that federal file is structured and searched is described at the National Register database and research page.

The entries in such registers describe architecture: date, style, materials, alterations, significance. They are written by people who looked at the building as a building, which is the only way this site looks at one too. Where a register entry concerns a private house, the map uses the description and not the address, and it does not place a pin.

Ticketed houses as institutions

Historic houses that sell tickets are the closest thing this map has to a house-by-house layer, and they are handled by a strict rule: the institution is the only source for its own details. Location, opening days, hours, prices and what can be visited all change by season and are published by the institution for exactly that reason. The map points to the institution. It does not restate those details, and it does not add anything the institution has not itself said.

What can be discussed freely is the architecture the visitor sees: the plan, the sequence of rooms, the service side, the way the building handled its climate. Those are institutional facts in the sense that they are on display to anyone who buys a ticket. What is not discussed is anything about the people connected with the house beyond what the institution presents as part of its own public account.

What is deliberately absent

The map has no layer for any of the following, and requests to add them are declined.

• Addresses, streets, or districts paired with a description of a private house.
• Annotated aerial or satellite views of private property.
• Walking routes that pass private houses as points of interest.
• Photographs in which a gate, a plate, a distinctive boundary or a view identifies a private house.
• "Formerly home of" entries. A house that once belonged to a named person is still a private house.
• Transactions of any kind. A purchase is a location record, as explained in purchases and sales.
• Any location supplied by a reader, however it was obtained.

The absence is not a gap waiting to be filled. It is the specification.

Keeping the reference current

Two kinds of change require an edit. A private house can become an institution, by opening to the public under an organization that publishes its own details; it then qualifies under the four tests and can be added on the institution's terms. An institution can close and revert to private use; it then fails the tests and comes off the map, including anything that described its location while it was open.

Entries are also removed on request from anyone connected with a building where the four tests were applied wrongly. The rule is to err toward removal, because the cost of a wrong pin is borne by a person and the cost of a missing pin is borne by nobody.

Common questions

Is a street of houses really different from one house?

Yes. The subject of a street entry is the group: the rhythm, the shared materials, the way the lots were cut. Nobody's door is singled out, and the entry would read the same if every house changed hands. The moment one house is picked out and described, the entry has changed subject.

Why not include houses that have been widely identified elsewhere?

Because republishing is an act with its own consequences, and prior exposure is neither consent nor a reason. A map that copies every identification it can find becomes the most complete version of the thing it claims to refuse. That is the whole of the reasoning, and it does not change with the fame of the house.

Can architecture be discussed without any location at all?

Almost all of it can. Plan, structure, material, climate response, phases of alteration and the logic of the lot are all legible without an address, which is how architecture and interiors and former homes proceed. Regional patterns can be described at the scale of a city, as in Los Angeles homes and New York homes, without descending to a parcel.

What if I only want to see a famous house from the road?

Then you want to stand in front of someone's home, and this site will not help with that. If the house is an institution, it will tell you itself where it is and when it opens. If it is not, the interesting part of it, the building, is available to you in the ways described above without the visit.