A Look at Hollywood and the movies : UNREAL ESTATE : At Home (Not Hers) With Sharon Stone

So here’s “Basic Instinct” star Sharon Stone on the cover of People magazine. Then there’s Stone pictured inside the publication, lounging by the pool “in the back yard of her L.A. home.”

Next we see Stone on the cover of Hello, a British magazine, “photographed for the first time ever in her beautiful Los Angeles home.”

“She’s bought her dream home,” the British publication announced.

The only trouble is, it is only a dream.

Stone hasn’t bought any new home at all, says her publicist. “I had to laugh when I saw the photo in People,” she said. “I knew that wasn’t Sharon’s home.”

Stone’s spokeswoman said she could not account for how Hello magazine writer Hedda Moye could write that the house where Stone was photographed had been purchased by Stone. She said Stone did not say it was her home.

And People was confused too. A spokeswoman for People said the magazine identified the home as Stone’s based on information that came with the photos that they purchased from Hello. She said People would be checking into the situation.

Meanwhile, Moye, the Hello writer, was said to be too busy to take Calendar’s calls.

The Malibu home at which Stone was photographed is actually owned by David Thind, a commercial real estate broker who met Stone through her manager, Chuck Binder.

Stone came to see the house shortly after Thind put it on the market in February at $4.5 million, Thind said. “She had tremendous interest in it,” he said. Then he said he was asked if his home could be used for a photo shoot.

“She said she was embarrassed to use her house and wanted to use mine as representing hers, because they wanted a real showplace,” Thind recalled. Thind’s house overlooks the Pacific and has two swimming pools and a tennis court.

But Stone’s publicist denied that the actress had ever seen the Thind home before the photos were taken, or that she had anything to do with finding the location for the photos. The spokeswoman said Stone agreed only to a photo session with photographer Richard McLaren and an accompanying interview for Hello magazine, but had no idea the photos later would be sold to People.

Thind recalls he “didn’t have a problem with her using my house. . . . I gave her permission . . . but she went a bit overboard,” he said. He didn’t realize that the story would appear in either of the widely read magazines.

In the British publication, she was photographed in more than half a dozen outfits and rooms, with such captions as, “Sharon lives alone in the sunny house filled with natural wood and fabrics,” and “She bought and redecorated a beautiful house in Los Angeles.” The American magazine mentions Stone’s “palatial home in the Hollywood Hills.”

In reality, Stone’s publicist said, the actress’s home is the one-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot house in the Hollywood Hills where she was interviewed by Barbara Walters on a TV special after the Academy Awards.

But even that bit of information is in dispute. Some reliable real estate sources say Stone’s home is in Sherman Oaks.