In 1988, a year before Glory, Denzel Washington paid $1.1 million for a 6,300-square-foot Colonial Revival house in Toluca Lake, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. The deal is circulating again this week as if it were fresh, but nothing about the house has changed hands or hit the market this month. This is a look back at a property with an unusually long Hollywood paper trail, and at what Washington made on it.
A 1940 house by Paul R. Williams
The house went up in 1940 for the comedian and actor Leon Errol, and its architect is the most interesting name in the chain of ownership. Paul Revere Williams, born in Los Angeles in 1894, was admitted to the American Institute of Architects in 1923 as its first Black member and designed more than 2,000 buildings over his career, from homes for Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball to the Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport.
He worked in whatever style a client wanted, and he did it under conditions that are hard to read about now. White clients in the 1920s were often uneasy sitting beside a Black man, so Williams taught himself to draw upside down from across the desk. He also pointed out, with some bitterness, that many of the homes he designed sat on lots whose deeds barred Black buyers. That record gives the 1988 sale an extra layer: a Black actor on his way to two Academy Awards buying a house a Black architect had drawn nearly half a century earlier.
Who lived there
After Errol came the Oscar winner William Holden, who lived in the house for more than a decade starting in the late 1940s. Accounts of the property say Holden hosted the 1952 wedding of his friends Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis there.
By the time Washington bought it, there were four bedrooms, an office and a separate dining room, and the main bedroom had a balcony plus a media room. The half-acre lot held a guest cottage, a pool and spa, a koi pond and a fire pit.
Washington was then best known for six seasons as Dr. Phillip Chandler on the hospital drama St. Elsewhere, which ended in 1988. Glory, released in 1989, brought him his first Oscar.
What he made on it
Washington sold the house in 2000 to Brenda Hampton, the TV writer and producer, for $1.9 million. Our working, using those two prices:
- Gain: $1.9 million minus $1.1 million is $800,000, or about 73% over 12 years.
- Yearly rate: 1.9 divided by 1.1 is 1.727; the 12th root of that is about 1.047, so roughly 4.7% a year, before taxes, fees or upkeep.
- Per square foot: about $175 in 1988 and about $302 in 2000, across the same 6,300 square feet.
A steady return rather than a windfall, and Washington had already traded up. In 1996 he and his wife, Pauletta, paid about $6.5 million for two lots in Beverly Park bought from Disney chairman Michael Eisner, now a two-acre estate with nearly 30,000 square feet in the main house and their primary residence. In 2022 they added an 8,150-square-foot condo in Century City for $10.9 million.
Posts sharing the story this week also say the Toluca Lake house resold for $4.445 million in 2019. We could not find a sale record or listing to confirm that figure or the buyer, so treat it as unverified.
Where to see Williams’s work
Williams retired in 1973 and died in 1980. His papers, long feared lost when the bank building that stored them burned in 1992, survived. In June 2020, the Getty Research Institute and the USC School of Architecture announced they had acquired the archive: about 35,000 architectural plans and 10,000 original drawings.
Further reading
Image: Alan Light, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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