Dick Van Dyke Has a Waterslide and Swims Daily Laps at 100 Years Old | House Tour 2026

On the night of December 9, 2024, a wildfire ignited in Malibu Canyon and came racing over the hillside toward the Sarah Retreat neighborhood. Dick Van Dyke could see the flames from his backyard. He tried to unsnarl his garden hose. He tried to get to his car. He exhausted himself and could not stand up. Three neighbors arrived, physically carried him out, returned to put out a small fire The man they carried out was 98 years old, three days away from his 99th birthday. He had lived in that Malibu house since 1986, when he paid $750,000 for it. Today it is worth approximately $8 million. It has a waterslide, a dance studio, an art studio, a golf putt in green, a jacuzzi, a bar, a pool large enough that he still swims daily laps in it three times a week after going to the gym, and a statue of Burt the Chimney Sweep from Mary Poppins displayed alongside the original film poster in the living room. Because, of course, it does. This is Dick Van Dyke's home. Nothing about it follows the conventional rules. Today, we're going inside that Malibu mansion. Every feature, every room, every detail of a property that a man has lived in, expanded, customized, and personalized across four decades, while also telling the full story of how he got there. We'll cover West Plains, Missouri, and Danville, Illinois, where he grew up in the Depression without knowing he was poor. The mime act on the West Coast nightclub circuit, the Groucho Marx connection, Mary Poppins and the role that redefined family entertainment, the Emmy that made him the oldest recipient in the award's history, the Coldplay music video shot in his Malibu home on his 99th birthday, and the fire that came for the house and failed. This is Dick Van Dyke, told through the address he has called home for nearly 40 years. There is a line Dick Van Dyke wrote in his autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of tells you almost everything about where he came from and how it shaped him. My brother and I laughed a lot as kids. We came up in the middle of the Depression, and neither one of us knew we were poor. We had nothing, but we didn't know it. Richard Wayne Van Dyke was born on December 13, 1925, in West Plains, Missouri, a small Ozark town of no particular celebrity ambitions, to Hazel Victoria McCord, a stenographer, and Lauren Wayne Van Dyke, a traveling salesman for the Sunshine Biscuit Company who was on the road more than he was home. The family moved to Danville, Illinois, when Dick was still very young. Danville was a town of about 30,000 people, surrounded by flat Illinois farmland, where the Depression pressed down on working families with a weight that most of those families were too busy surviving to fully articulate. Danville was a town of 30,000 people. Van Dyke wrote, "...and it felt as if most of them were relatives." He grew up on Hazel Street and then Grant Street, in modest houses that his good-natured parents filled with warmth they could not fill with money. His father's cookie-selling humor, his mother's religious devotion, and the constant physical comedy of two brothers competing for attention in a small Midwestern house produced something that no amount of formal training could manufacture. A natural comedian who found joy instinctively as a survival mechanism and never lost the habit. His high school classmates at Danville High School included Donald O'Connor and Bobby Short, both of whom would go on to distinguished entertainment careers. One of his closest friends was a cousin of Gene Hackman, who also grew up in Danville in those years. The entertainment industry had its roots, it turned out, in the flat Illinois soil more than anyone could have predicted. Van Dyke joined the A Capella Choir. He threw himself into the drama club, and a drama teacher who recognized what was in front of her convinced him that performance, not the ministry he had briefly considered following his deeply religious mother's path, was where his life was supposed to go. He enlisted in the Army Air Forces during World War II, serving from 1944 to 1946, assigned to the Armed Forces Radio Service, and even then, he was performing, putting on shows for his fellow servicemen, understanding at 20 years old that making people laugh in difficult circumstances was not trivial, it was essential. After the war, he returned to Danville, picked up part-time radio work at WDAN, and then answered an advertisement that would change the course of his life. A comedian named Phil Erickson was looking for a partner for a mime act he was developing, called the Merry Mutes. The two of them drove to California, performed in nightclubs and hotels up and down the West Coast, eventually settled in Atlanta, and landed a slot on The Ed Sullivan Show, the most powerful launchpad in American entertainment. In 1948, Van Dyke married Margie Willett in a ceremony broadcast live on a radio show called Bride and Groom, performed at the Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. He was 22 years old. He had no money, no stable income, and an extraordinary instinct for physical comedy that he had nowhere near finished developing. The stage was set in every sense of the word. Dick Van Dyke made his Broadway debut in November 1959 in The Girls Against the Boys, a modest production that nevertheless put him in front of New York audiences for the first time and confirmed that what worked in nightclubs and on television worked just as well on the stage. Then came Bye Bye Birdie, which opened on April 14, 1960, ran for over 500 performances, and won Van Dyke the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He was 34 years old and Broadway's newest star. Carl Reiner had been watching. In 1961, CBS gave Van Dyke the anchor role in The Dick Van Dyke Show, a comedy about a television writer named Rob Petrie, his wife Laura, and the workplace comedians around him. The show ran for five seasons, won 15 Emmy Awards in total, and produced the kind of consistent, character-driven physical comedy that television had never fully seen before. Van Dyke won five Emmy Awards for the series. His pratfall over the Ottoman in the opening credits became one of the most iconic images in American television history. In 1964, Walt Disney personally recruited him to play Bert the Chimney Sweep in Mary Poppins alongside Julie Andrews. The film earned 13 Academy Award nominations, won five Oscars, and made more than $100 million at the global box office in its initial release. Van Dyke's dancing chimney sweep, his animated penguin sequence, his Cockney accent, which he has since cheerfully admitted was historically terrible, became part of the fabric of childhood for multiple generations of viewers. "'I suppose that I never completely gave up my childhood idea of being a minister,' he once reflected. "'Every role I've played was a minister in some way. Trying to lift people up?' Chitty Chitty Bang Bang followed in 1968." Murder ran for eight seasons on CBS from 1993 to 2001. Night at the Museum brought him to a new generation of audiences in 2006. And in 2024, at the age of 98, he became the oldest person ever to win a Creative Arts Emmy Award, recognized for his guest appearance on the Disney Plus series The Reluctant Traveler. He appeared in Coldplay's music video for All My Love, shot in his Malibu home, released on December 13, 2024, the date of his 99th birthday. "'I'm acutely aware that I could go any day now,' he said during the shoot, sitting in the home he has loved for four decades. "'But I don't know why. It doesn't concern me. I'm not afraid of it.'" He turned 100 on December 13, 2025. There was a celebration. Dick Van Dyke bought the property at 23,215 Mariposa de Oro Street in the Serra Retreat neighborhood of Malibu in September 1986 for $750,000. He was 60 years old. The Dick Van Dyke Show had been off the air for 20 years. Mary Poppins was already cultural legend, and he had found a gated hilltop enclave in Malibu that offered the two things he had always valued above everything else in a home. Privacy and room to move. The Serra Retreat is not just any Malibu neighborhood. It sits tucked between Malibu Canyon Road and Corral Canyon Road, shielded from the Pacific Coast Highway by the coastal hills, elevated enough to command sweeping views while remaining completely insulated from the tourist traffic that makes beachfront PCH properties feel exposed. It is an invitation-only community in every practical sense, gated, private, and home to some of the entertainment industry's most established names. It is also, as Dick Van Dyke has demonstrated across nearly four decades of continuous residence, the kind of neighborhood where people actually stay. The home itself is a study in what happens when a genuinely playful human being is given four decades to customize a property to his exact preferences. The original 1973 structure has been expanded and renovated extensively, the living space now running to approximately 2,800 square feet across four bedrooms and four bathrooms, with mid-century modern bones updated throughout with coastal California warmth. The interiors are personal in the way that only a long-term owner's home can be. Mary Poppins Memorabilia sits alongside family photographs, a birth-a-chimney-sweep statue stands next to the original film poster, and the walls carry the specific accumulated weight of a life fully lived in one place. The kitchen and dining areas flow naturally through to the outdoor living spaces that define the property's personality. Van Dyke added a bar that faces the pool area, designed for the kind of casual entertaining the Malibu climate demands. An entertainment hut sits adjacent to the pool deck, a small covered patio opens onto a lawn that runs toward the pool edge, and then, the feature that made international headlines when Van Dyke posted about it on social media, the water slide. A full, properly-sized water slide, descending directly into the swimming pool, installed because Dick Van Dyke, at whatever age he happened to be at the time, decided that his pool needed a water slide. He still swims daily laps in that pool, after going to the gym three times a week. Beyond the pool, the grounds accommodate a golf-putting green, a nod to the same individual athletic interests that had made Van Dyke skip team sports in high school. The backyard also houses the two rooms that reveal his most private passions, a dance studio, which has been operational through every phase of his ownership, and an art studio, where Van Dyke paints in the quiet morning hours that bookend his gym sessions and pool laps. The dance studio, in particular, carries specific weight. This is a man whose physical movement redefined what television comedy could do, who won his Tony Award through choreography as much as character, whose entire career was built on the intelligence of his body. The studio is not nostalgic. It is functional. It is used. He shares the home with his wife, Arlene Silver, a makeup artist he met in 2006 and married in 2012. A 46-year age difference that generated the kind of tabloid coverage neither of them found particularly interesting. The home carries their shared life as clearly as it carries his history. And when the Franklin Fire came over the hill on December 9, 2024, and three neighbors carried Dick Van Dyke out to safety, while one of them put out a small fire in the guest house, the main house stood. The water slide was intact. The dance studio was intact. The art studio was intact. The Bert the Chimney Sweep statue was intact. And on December 13, 2024, Dick Van Dyke turned 99 years old. He went to the gym. Dick Van Dyke paid $750,000 for a Malibu hillside home in 1986, installed a water slide, built a dance studio, filled it with Mary Poppins memorabilia, swam in the pool into his 100th year, and let three neighbors carry him out when a wildfire came for it, then went back and kept living in it. No mansion hopping, no real estate portfolio, just one home, nearly 40 years, a water slide, and a man who has never once stopped moving. So here's the question. Does Dick Van Dyke's Malibu home, with its water slide and its dance studio and its art studio and its garden hose, he tried to unsnarl at 98, tell you more about him than any film or television role ever did? Drop your answer in the comments below.