Lee Daniels’s Beverly Hills House Is a Minimalist Dream

It’s all his business manager’s fault, really. Oscar-nominated director, writer, and producer Lee Daniels never wanted to set up a permanent home in Los Angeles (“I’m a New Yorker,” he says), but hotel living apparently adds up, and so he finally realized, with some prodding from his business manager, that buying a home would actually be a more economical option.

But even as Daniels was house-hunting last year, the Empire cocreator knew he didn’t want to go big. “So many of my friends’ homes are pretentious or they’re just big for no reason other than being big,” he says. “I liked the bones of this house because I knew that I would be able to furnish it—the more minimal, the better.” When he moved in last spring, he says, “it felt like I was putting on a pair of jeans,” and he furnished the whole thing, with the help of his friend Roxy Sowlaty, in a month and a half.

Check out the full Architectural Digest article, click here!