Viola Davis House: The Toluca Lake Home She Rebuilt Around The Woman King

Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon bought their Toluca Lake house in 2016 for a reported $5.7 million, lived in it for about five years, and then rebuilt its interior around a film. The renovation happened while they were in South Africa shooting The Woman King, and Davis has said directly that the colour and culture they encountered there shaped what they did to the house.

The result was documented in Architectural Digest in early 2023, which makes this one of the better-evidenced homes covered on this site: the owners opened it up themselves, named their designer, and explained their reasoning.

This guide covers that house and its renovation, the smaller home they sold before it, and the childhood housing Davis has written about at length, which is the context that makes the rest of it land.

Viola Davis’s property record

Who is Viola Davis?

Viola Davis is an American actress and producer, and one of the small number of performers to have completed the EGOT, winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. Her work includes Doubt, The Help, Fences, How to Get Away with Murder, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Woman King.

She has been married to Julius Tennon since 2003, and the two run the production company JuVee Productions together. They have a daughter.

She grew up in Central Falls, Rhode Island, in severe poverty, and has written about that housing in unsparing detail in her memoir Finding Me: condemned buildings, no reliable heat or hot water, and infestations she has described publicly and repeatedly. She raised it herself, which is why it belongs in an article about her house. The distance between those apartments and a 7,545-square-foot Los Angeles estate is the actual story here, and it is one she has chosen to tell.

The Granada Hills house

Before Toluca Lake, Davis and Tennon owned a house in Granada Hills, in the north San Fernando Valley, bought in 2005 for $1.17 million.

They sold it for $1.15 million, marginally less than they paid. That is a loss before costs, and it spans a period that included the 2008 crash, which affected the outer Valley considerably harder than it did the neighbourhoods closer to the studios. It is a useful corrective to the assumption that celebrity property is automatically profitable.

The Toluca Lake estate

In 2016 they bought in Toluca Lake, the quiet neighbourhood on the Valley side of the hills that sits close to the Burbank studios. The house had been built the year before, in a European style, and runs 7,545 square feet with five bedrooms and eight bathrooms.

Toluca Lake has housed working television and film people for the better part of a century precisely because it is unfashionable, residential and a short drive from the sound stages, a point also made in the account of Julie Bowen’s house in the same neighbourhood.

The renovation, and where it came from

The couple lived in the house for roughly five years before renovating it with the Los Angeles designer Michaela Cadiz. The timing was unusual: the work was under way while Davis was in South Africa filming The Woman King, in which she plays General Nanisca, the leader of an all-female warrior unit drawn from the historical Dahomey Mino of West Africa.

Davis has described the connection plainly, saying that they were working in South Africa while the renovation was unfolding and were inspired by the colour and culture there. Cadiz worked with that rather than against the couple’s own preference for restrained, neutral-leaning schemes, adding graphic wallpapers to bring in the pattern and intensity while keeping the underlying palette calm.

That is a genuinely unusual origin for a house interior. Most celebrity renovations take their cue from a designer’s portfolio or a magazine reference. This one took it from a film set eleven thousand kilometres away, while the owner was on it.

The finished house was published in Architectural Digest‘s Open Door series in January 2023, with both Davis and Tennon presenting it.

Where does Viola Davis live now?

Toluca Lake, Los Angeles.

The evidence is about as direct as it gets. She and Tennon bought the house in 2016, renovated it around 2021 and 2022, and then filmed a tour of it inside their own home for a design magazine in 2023, discussing it as their family’s long-term base. There is no report of a sale, a listing, or a move since.

What is not documented is what the house is worth now. Figures of around $7.5 million circulate as a current valuation; that is an automated estimate rather than an appraisal or a sale, and the last real number attached to the property is the $5.7 million paid in 2016, before a substantial renovation whose cost has never been published.

Davis and Tennon also work as producers, and their company is Los Angeles-based, so nothing about their careers points elsewhere. Black film-makers who have built production companies alongside their on-screen careers have often anchored them to a specific place, as the account of Tyler Perry’s Atlanta estate shows in a different city.

Sources

• CNN Style on the Architectural Digest feature and the couple’s Los Angeles home.
• PureWow on the 2016 purchase at a reported $5.7 million, the property’s size, the five-year wait before renovating, and the work with designer Michaela Cadiz.
• Black Enterprise on the South African influences behind the renovation and Davis’s own comments.
• Trulia on the Toluca Lake purchase and the property’s configuration.