Early in Jackson’s career, following his graduation from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972, he immersed himself in New York City’s vibrant theater scene. So it is only fitting that he and wife LaTanya, whom he married in 1980, purchased a brownstone at 522 West 143rd Street in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem in 1981. The New York Times reported that the couple paid $35,000 for the property, according to a deed filed with the city, and sold it for $125,000 in 1997. “One reason for the move [to the West Coast] was the weather,” he told the Times in 2002. “We came back to New York after a year and a half in LA, and we went to our brownstone in Harlem. I had to chop the ice off the steps. I still love New York, I just didn’t love being a brownstone owner in Manhattan anymore.”
Tudor-style Encino home
When the Jacksons’ respective careers brought them out to Los Angeles for work in the early 1990s, the Pulp Fiction actor and his wife rented property in Encino, a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley region. But he and LaTanya, who welcomed daughter Zoe in 1982, craved something more permanent for their family. “We wanted our daughter to live in a homey environment,” Jackson told Architectural Digest in 2000. “My wife and I are essentially just very Southern people raised in middle-class households.”
As LaTanya drove through the valley one day, she came across a half-timber house with mottled brick and thought, That’s the house. The Los Angeles Times reported in 1995 that they purchased the Tudor-style home for $1.1 million. Built in 1981, the gated estate reportedly featured a four-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot main house, including a two-story family room with a bar, and a three-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot guest house with green velvet walls and a full kitchen. The Jacksons enlisted the help of designers, including decorator Cecil N. Hayes, who also worked on Wesley Snipes’s house, to make the home their own.