Julie Bowen House: The Toluca Lake Home Bing Crosby Built

Julie Bowen’s house has a better provenance than most. It was built in 1936 as a carriage house for Bing Crosby, and by the time she bought it in July 2021 it had passed through a series of well-known owners, most recently the singer Meghan Trainor. Bowen paid $6 million for it.

She funded the move with an unusually good sale. The mid-century modern house she had bought in the Hollywood Hills in November 2018 for $3.1 million sold in the same month for $4.2 million, above its $3.85 million asking price. Selling above ask is rare enough at that level to be worth noting. This guide covers both transactions, the Toluca Lake house’s history, and where she lives now.

Julie Bowen’s property record

Who is Julie Bowen?

Julie Bowen is an American actress, born in 1970, best known for playing Claire Dunphy across eleven seasons of Modern Family, a role that won her two Emmy Awards. Her earlier work included Ed and Boston Legal, and she has continued working steadily in television since the series ended in 2020.

She married the real estate investor Scott Phillips in 2004, and they have three sons, Oliver and the twins John and Gustav. The divorce was finalised in 2018, the same year she bought the Hollywood Hills house. That timing is worth noting: both of the transactions covered here fall in the period immediately after her marriage ended and as Modern Family was finishing.

The Hollywood Hills house, and the sale above asking

In November 2018 Bowen bought a mid-century modern house in the Hollywood Hills from Tony Peck for $3.1 million. It runs 3,212 square feet with four bedrooms and four bathrooms, on a lot of roughly an acre, which in that part of the hills is generous.

She owned it for under three years. It was listed at $3,850,000 and sold in July 2021 for $4,200,000, some $350,000 above the asking price.

That detail deserves attention because it is the opposite of what happens in most of the transactions covered on this site. Celebrity houses usually sell below their asking price, often well below, because the price was set optimistically in the first place. Bowen’s sold over. Two things explain it: a glass-walled mid-century house on a large hillside lot was exactly what buyers wanted in mid-2021, and the asking price was realistic rather than aspirational.

Against $3.1 million paid less than three years earlier, the sale produced a gross gain of about $1.1 million.

The Toluca Lake house and its history

Days after that sale, Bowen paid $6 million for a property in Toluca Lake, the quiet neighbourhood on the San Fernando Valley side of the hills that has long housed people working at the nearby studios.

The house was built in 1936 as a carriage house for Bing Crosby, whose own property history is covered separately on this site. It has since been converted and extended, and together with a guest house it totals around 7,200 square feet, with five bedrooms and seven and a half bathrooms. The property sits behind a gated drive on roughly an acre, with a three-vehicle garage and a loft above it, a swimming pool and a spa.

Its recent chain of owners is a reasonable summary of Los Angeles itself. Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green owned it before Meghan Trainor, who bought it in mid-2016 for $4.9 million and sold it to Bowen five years later for $6 million, a gain of about $1.1 million. Trainor then moved on to Encino.

Bowen effectively swapped a compact modern house on a hillside for a considerably larger period property on flat ground with a guest house, and did it for a net outlay of about $1.8 million after the sale of the first.

Where does Julie Bowen live now?

Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, in the house she bought in July 2021.

This is well supported. The purchase is documented in property reporting from The Real Deal, The Hollywood Reporter and Forbes among others, and there is no report of a sale, a listing or a further move in the five years since. She has continued to work in Los Angeles.

The choice of neighbourhood makes practical sense for someone in her position. Toluca Lake sits minutes from the Burbank studios where a great deal of American television is made, is residential and low-key rather than fashionable, and has houses with actual gardens on actual lots. It is where working television actors have lived for the better part of a century, which is exactly why Bing Crosby built there in the first place.

What is not documented, and what this article will not estimate, is what the property is worth today. The $6 million she paid in 2021 is the last real number attached to it.

What the two transactions show

Bowen’s record is short, recent and unusually well executed. She bought a well-priced hillside house, held it through a rising market, sold it above asking, and put the proceeds into a larger property with genuine architectural history and room for three children.

There is no portfolio, no string of investment purchases and no second home in the public record. Two houses, three years apart, and a move that made obvious sense at the point her long-running series ended and her family circumstances changed.

Sources

• TMZ on the July 2021 sale of the Hollywood Hills house at $4.2 million against a $3.85 million asking price.
• Traded on the November 2018 purchase from Tony Peck at $3.1 million.
• The Hollywood Reporter and The Real Deal on the $6 million Toluca Lake purchase and the property’s details.
• Forbes on the house’s 1936 origins as a Bing Crosby carriage house and its chain of ownership.