James Charles House: The Encino Home He Rented

The James Charles house most fans picture is the black-and-white one from his early 2019 videos, in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. He never owned it. He was renting it by May 2019, when Variety put the rent at $17,000 a month, after its owner offered it for rent in 2018. The house was built in 2016, a few years before he arrived, and the city's own paperwork shows how it came to be there.

There are no photographs of it here, because it is a private home. What follows comes from Los Angeles building permits, the county tax roll, Variety's two reports, and the design videos made inside it.

On our map the house is James Charles's former Encino home, filed as a past address: in 2020 he bought a house of his own.

Built in 2016, on a lot cleared that January

The lot was cleared in January 2016. On January 8, the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety approved tearing down the house then standing there and its attached garage, and a permit for a new pool had gone out the day before.

The replacement followed within weeks. On February 16, 2016, the city permitted a new two-story house. The house permits were pulled by an owner-builder: the property owner, rather than a licensed general contractor, took legal responsibility for the work. The city valued the construction at $595,000, the estimate of the work it uses to set permit fees, which is a different thing from what the house cost to buy. The Los Angeles County Assessor's roll gives 2016 as the year it was built. How old the house it replaced was, the city's online permit data does not reach back far enough to say.

Variety's real estate column filled in the rest in May 2019. It described a Cape Cod-style house, sold new in 2016 to a private buyer, who offered it for rent in 2018. The column was not flattering about the setting. It called this part of Encino unfashionable and the lot, at about 0.15 acres, on the small side.

A tenant at two prices

Charles was the tenant here, and Variety reported his rent twice. In May 2019 it put the lease at $17,000 a month. In February 2020, citing records, it said he had been paying $15,000 a month for “the past year or two.” Both reports carry the same columnist's byline, nine months apart, and the second does not explain the lower figure.

Variety never gave a lease length, and we have not found a record that does.

The Mr. Kate makeovers

On February 5, 2019, the Mr. Kate channel, run by the married designers Kate Albrecht and Joey Zehr, posted two videos made in the house. In “James Charles Surprise Room Makeover,” an episode of the channel's series “OMG We're Coming Over,” the team redid the entry hall, the room that sets a visitor's first impression of the house. They kept it black and white, added wall decals made from the duo's own prints, and worked in safety pins as a nod to his signature earring. A companion piece, “James Charles House Makeover,” carries the same black-and-white base through several more rooms, giving each its own mood. Tubefilter reported the collaboration the day it went up.

Leaving for a house of his own

In February 2020, Variety reported that Charles had paid $7M for a brand-new house elsewhere in Encino in an off-market deal, which means the sale was arranged privately and the house was never advertised to the public.

No record we found dates his move out of the rental. By August 25, 2020, he was showing subscribers around the new house on his channel, The Tab reported the next day.