Denzel Washington's Houses: Beverly Park, Toluca Lake, and a Central Park Condo

Denzel Washington's home in Los Angeles is in Beverly Park, the hilltop enclave above Beverly Hills, where Architectural Digest says he and his wife, Pauletta, bought land in 1996. The house was finished in 1999. The magazine dates their purchase of an apartment in a limestone condominium on Central Park West, in Manhattan, to 2006. Before Beverly Park, from 1988 to 2000, the family lived in Toluca Lake, in a 1940 house by the architect Paul R. Williams that had already been home to William Holden and, for one evening in 1952, the setting for Ronald and Nancy Reagan's wedding dinner.

This page works from the Los Angeles County tax roll, a photograph in the Reagan Library's archive, and the real estate press. Where the county's dates and the magazines' dates differ, it says which is which.

The county roll shows no sale of the Beverly Park land since 1996, a longer run than any other address in this story. The Beverly Park house has its own profile here.

Beverly Park: land in 1996, a house in 1999

Beverly Park was meant to be a golf course. According to Hilton & Hyland, a Beverly Hills brokerage, the land was set aside for a country club that would carry Dean Martin's name, before the developers Elliot Gottfurcht and Brian Adler began laying out homesites there in the late 1970s. They finished the 250-acre enclave in 1990. Despite the Beverly Hills name, the county taxes this lot as part of the City of Los Angeles.

The county's record gives the property a clear timeline. The lot changed hands in 1996, and the finished house dates to 1999. The roll still values the land from that 1996 sale, which is how California keeps track of an owner: a home's taxable value is reset when it sells, then rises by only a small amount each year until the next sale. Nothing has reset it since, which means the land has not sold since 1996.

Architectural Digest, in a November 2024 roundup of his homes, says the Washingtons bought a pair of Beverly Park lots from Michael Eisner, then the chairman of Disney, for about $6.5M. AD's own wording is two lots, and the county today carries the house on a single parcel of a little over two acres, so that price may cover more ground than this one property. The deed that would split it is a document we have not seen.

The house went up on empty ground. PureWow reported in 2024 that the couple started building on an uninhabited lot in the late 1990s, which fits the 1999 date on the roll. Today there is a four-story main house, a guesthouse by the pool, and a tennis court, per AD.

Our 2019 version said Washington bought a finished house in 1992 for $2.675M. The county's timeline starts his ownership in 1996.

Toluca Lake: the Paul R. Williams house, 1988 to 2000

The family's earlier house is in Toluca Lake, a small neighborhood at the eastern edge of the San Fernando Valley, and it is the oldest of the three by decades. Paul R. Williams, the Los Angeles architect who designed houses for a generation of film stars, drew it in 1940 for the comedian Leon Errol, according to Architectural Digest. A 2020 illustrated guide to Williams houses, commissioned by HomeAdvisor, names it for Errol and his wife, Stella, and describes Errol as an actor in vaudeville and the movies. Variety, in 2019, described a shingled exterior with stone facing. The county roll agrees on 1940, and it records the house across two lots of the original tract held as one parcel, so the house sits on a double-size piece of ground.

William Holden, the Stalag 17 star, owned the house from 1947 to 1959, according to Toluca Lake Magazine, and lived there with his wife, Ardis, who acted as Brenda Marshall. On March 4, 1952, Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis at the Little Brown Church in the Valley, a small chapel in Studio City built in 1939, as Mary Mallory recounted for the Daily Mirror. Her piece quotes Nancy Reagan's memory that the Holdens were the only friends there. Afterward the four went back to Toluca Lake. A photograph in the Reagan Library's archive, dated that day, shows the two couples cutting the wedding cake, and the library's caption places it at the Holdens' house.

Some accounts, Architectural Digest's 2024 roundup among them, say Holden hosted the wedding at the house. The celebration afterward was at the house. The vows were said at the chapel in Studio City.

Washington bought the Toluca Lake house in 1988 for $1.1M, Architectural Digest says, the year before Glory came out, and kept it for 12 years. In 2000 he sold it to Brenda Hampton, the television writer who created 7th Heaven, for $1.9M, a sale Variety and AD both report.

Hampton stayed longer than either of the stars before her. She kept the house for 19 years, put it up for sale in March 2019 at about $4.5M, according to Variety, and sold it that year for about $4.45M. The county roll still values the property from that 2019 sale, so it has not changed hands since.

New York: a condo facing Central Park, 2006

The Manhattan apartment is in a limestone condominium on Central Park West. The Real Deal named Washington among the building's future celebrity residents in November 2007, before the building was complete, and Architectural Digest dates the Washingtons' purchase to 2006.

Whether he still owns it is not settled. 6sqft named him among the residents in 2017, and AD's 2024 roundup describes the purchase without saying whether the family still holds it. A search of the city's deed index found no deed under the Washingtons' own names. The Central Park condo is on our map on the strength of that coverage. Its present ownership is the part no record we reached confirms.