Eddie Murphy's House: The Beverly Park Villa He Built and His Former Folsom Lake Estate

Eddie Murphy lives in Beverly Park, the enclave in the hills above Beverly Hills, in a house he built from scratch. He bought the land, then empty, in 2001, and hired the architect Richard Landry to design a Mediterranean-style villa for it. The house was finished in 2003; Realtor.com News and the county assessor's roll agree on both years. More than two decades on it is still home. Netflix's documentary Being Eddie, released on November 12, 2025, filmed him there, according to Realtor.com News.

In 1998, three years before Beverly Park, he and his then-wife, Nicole, bought an estate above Folsom Lake, northeast of Sacramento. That house had a stranger second act.

The villa Landry drew for that empty hillside lot has its own page, Eddie Murphy's Beverly Park home, with the map pin and the county's figures. The exact address is the part we keep behind the ropes.

A late arrival in a 1988 subdivision

Beverly Park is younger than its reputation. According to Hilton & Hyland, the Beverly Hills brokerage, work on it began in the late 1970s on land once meant for a country club named for Dean Martin, and the developers Elliot Gottfurcht and Brian Adler finished the 250-acre enclave in 1990. The county's own records put a sharper date on it, and show how late Murphy came. The lots on his stretch of Beverly Park were created on October 26, 1988, and the oldest houses there date to 1992, 11 years before his was finished.

Run the county's parcel layer for his section of Beverly Park and 56 parcels come back with a house on them. Only three carry a build year of 2003, his among them, and 43 carry an earlier one. The roll records the house standing today, so a lot that was rebuilt shows its newest date and the count leans young. Even so, most of the neighbors were moved in by the time his crews broke ground.

Beverly Hills is only the mailing address. The lot falls inside the City of Los Angeles, which is where it is taxed and why its building permits came from Los Angeles, a city that publishes its permit history as open data.

What the permits show

The application for a new house and garage reached the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety on October 24, 2001, and the permit was issued on January 22, 2002. The city valued the job at $3.2M. That figure is the city's estimate of the work, used to set permit fees, and it says little about what anyone spent. California Energy Designs, the project's engineers, gives the budget as $19.5M on its own project page and names Finton Construction as the builder and Ron Wilson as the interior designer. In April 2002 a revision corrected the plans to three stories and added floor area for storage and sleeping quarters on the bottom floor.

The lot is on a slope, and almost every stage needed a hillside grading permit, the city's sign-off for cutting into a hill and filling it back. Retaining walls up to 10 feet high came first. In March 2003 the city permitted a pool, block walls and a set of underground vaults for the equipment, and a second pool permit that December describes the one that was built: an irregular shape, 60 feet by 48 feet and five feet deep, with a spa 10 feet across.

The grounds kept growing after the house was up. A tennis court followed in April 2004. That June brought a vault for the pool machinery, a bridge 21 feet by 18 feet, and a trellis beside the court, and in August came a sunken masonry barbecue area, 20 feet square and walled in.

The paperwork closed later than the house did. In August 2004 the city issued a permit to finish the work begun under the first one, noting that the house was 90 percent complete. The final sign-off came on June 9, 2005.

That date explains a number our old version of this page got wrong. It said Murphy had overhauled an existing mansion in 2005 for $20M. The permits show a new house on empty land, the county roll dates the house to 2003, and 2005 is the year the city closed the file. The $20M sits close to the engineers' $19.5M budget.

Still his

The roll also says he never sold. California reassesses a property only when it changes hands or new construction is added, so the year a value was set works as a timestamp. The land's value was last set in 2001, the year he bought it, and the house's in 2004, when the new construction went on the roll. Neither has moved since. The city's most recent permit for the house, in March 2024, was for an interior kitchen remodel.

Inside, California Energy Designs and Realtor.com News both list a full-size indoor bowling alley and a screening room.

The house above Folsom Lake

Active NorCal and CBS Sacramento both date the purchase to 1998. Murphy and Nicole bought the estate in Placer County, northeast of Sacramento, with views over Folsom Lake. Its page, Eddie Murphy's former Folsom Lake house, carries the record for a home the family left in 2007.

Nicole kept the house in the divorce, Active NorCal reported, and she sold it in 2007, the year CBS Sacramento and The Sacramento Bee both give for the sale. In 2014 CBS Sacramento reported that the owner who bought it then had used it for charity events.

The friend who moved in

While Nicole still owned it, the house became part of a federal fraud prosecution. Troy Stratos, an old friend from her teenage years, had become her financial adviser. According to the federal complaint, as CBS Sacramento reported it in January 2012, he told her he was arranging a sale of the house to friends from Middle Eastern royal families, and leased Rolls-Royces and a BMW because the buyers would expect to see them in the drive. There was no royal buyer and no deal, the complaint said, and he lived in the house rent-free.

The outcome is on the court record. Stratos pleaded guilty in 2016 to federal fraud charges that included defrauding Nicole, and on December 12, 2016, US District Judge Troy L. Nunley sentenced him in Sacramento to more than 21 years in prison. Nicole testified against him, telling the court that he had been there all along to take her money, as Crime Voice reported it. The outlets that covered the prosecution do not agree on how much he took.

After the Murphys

CBS Sacramento reported the house back on the market in January 2014. In July 2018 it went up for sale at $10M and drew no buyer, according to Active NorCal, and on October 27, 2018, it went to auction with no minimum bid. As KIRO 7 relayed The Sacramento Bee's account, 16 bidders took about five minutes, and a Bay Area investor won.

Murphy's neighbors in the hills, and the city line that splits the 90210 ZIP code, are on our Beverly Hills celebrity homes map.