Margaret Josephs bought her house in Englewood, New Jersey, for one reason: it had a ballroom. That decision has shaped everything that followed, because the property was a century-old Tudor in need of comprehensive work, and the renovation that started before 2018 was still generating new phases four years later.
The house became a running storyline on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, partly because her husband, Joe Benigno, is a contractor and insisted on running the job himself. The result is a preserved Tudor exterior wrapped around an interior Joseph has described as a rock and roll hotel.
This guide covers what the house actually is, how the renovation unfolded, which figures attached to it online are real and which are not, and whether she still lives there after leaving the show in 2026.
Who is Margaret Josephs?
Margaret Josephs is an American businesswoman and television personality, best known as a cast member on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, which she joined in 2017 for the show’s eighth season. She is the founder, owner, and designer of the lifestyle brand The Macbeth Collection, which she built well before her television career.
In March 2026, she announced she would not be returning to the series after seven seasons, saying she had been in discussions with the network since the previous December and that the timing was right. She is married to Joe Benigno, a contractor, and the two of them are the reason her house has been documented as thoroughly as it has.
The Englewood Tudor
The house sits in Englewood, in Bergen County, New Jersey, a commuter town across the Hudson from Manhattan with a stock of substantial early twentieth-century houses. Josephs’ is one of them, a Tudor of around 115 years old at the time the renovation began.
She has been direct about why she bought it. The house has a ballroom, and that single feature sold her on the property. Houses of that era in that part of New Jersey occasionally have them, and they are almost impossible to reproduce in a new build. She and Benigno bought it knowingly as a project rather than as a finished home.
Crucially, they kept the exterior. The Tudor façade was preserved, which is both a planning-friendly decision and an aesthetic one, and it sets up the contrast that defines the property: a conventional period exterior with an interior that is anything but.
The renovation, phase by phase
This was not a quick refresh. Bravo’s own coverage tracks it across years, and the sequence is worth setting out because it explains why the project felt endless to viewers.
By 2018, the work was still in early phases. In November 2020, the custom mural in the ballroom was underway. The kitchen was finished that December. By May 2021, the kitchen, the outdoor kitchen, and the ballroom were all complete. In November 2022, installation began on an in-ground pool, and landscaping and hardscaping continued after that.
Benigno oversaw most of the work himself, and his reluctance to bring in outside contractors became a recurring point of friction on the show. Whatever that did for the timeline, it is the reason the house is genuinely custom rather than specified from a catalogue. The mural in the ballroom, for instance, is his own black-and-white design rather than a purchased finish.
Renovating a house of this age is a fundamentally different exercise from building new, and the pace reflects that rather than any lack of effort. The same lesson runs through the coverage of Joanna Gaines’s lakehouse restoration.
What the interior actually looks like
Josephs has described the finished aesthetic as high Hollywood vintage glamour, and elsewhere as a rock and roll hotel. Both are fair.
The ballroom is the centrepiece: black-stained mahogany flooring, a black lacquered fireplace wall, Benigno’s mural, a teal sofa and a bar area. The kitchen pairs grey cabinets with gold hardware, heavily patterned wallpaper, custom refrigerator panels and dark appliances. Her home office features bright pink banana-leaf wallpaper with velvet chairs. Outside there is a full outdoor kitchen next to the dining room, a substantial grill area, sculptural seating and, since 2022, the pool.
It is a house of strong decisions rather than safe ones, which is consistent with how she presents herself publicly. Reality television has produced a number of homes that function as extensions of their owner’s persona, most obviously Erika Jayne’s Los Angeles house, and this belongs in that category.
What the house cost, and what is not known
No purchase price or date for the Englewood house has been published in any reliable source, and neither has the cost of the renovation.
Figures of around $2 million and $2.2 million circulate widely online. These are estimates produced by celebrity net-worth and gossip sites rather than recorded transactions, and they are not attributed to a deed, a listing or a local property record. They may be in the right general range for a large period house in Englewood, but they should not be quoted as what she paid or as what the house is worth.
Some sites also make specific claims about mortgages and financial difficulties connected to the property. Those claims come from gossip blogs, are not supported by court or county records that anyone has produced, and are not repeated here.
Where does Margaret Josephs live now?
In the same Englewood house.
This is well supported. The renovation continued into recent years with landscaping and pool work, which nobody undertakes on a property they are leaving. She has not listed the house, and no sale has been reported. Coverage of her March 2026 departure from The Real Housewives of New Jersey makes clear that leaving the show did not involve leaving New Jersey, and among the reasons she gave for stepping away were spending more time with her family and focusing on her design work, both of which point toward staying put.
What is not known, and what nobody outside the household could state, is whether she intends to remain there long-term now that the house is essentially finished and the television storyline that ran alongside it has ended.
Sources
- Bravo on the Englewood house, the ballroom that prompted the purchase, the renovation timeline, and the finished rooms.
- Bravo on the before-and-after of the renovation.
- Yahoo Entertainment on her March 2026 announcement that she was leaving the series after seven seasons.
- Wikipedia for her background and The Macbeth Collection.
