Really, his business manager is to blame. Oscar-nominated director, writer, and producer Lee Daniels never to live in Los Angeles (“I’m a New Yorker,” he says), but hotel living got expensive, so his business manager convinced him to buy a home.

Even while house-hunting last year, Empire cocreator Daniels knew he didn’t want to go big. “So many of my friends’ homes are pretentious or just big for no reason,” he says. “I liked the bones of this house because I knew I could furnish it—the more minimal, the better.” When he moved in last spring, “it felt like I was putting on a pair of jeans,” and he furnished it in a month and a half with his friend Roxy Sowlaty.

Daniels decorated the four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bathroom boxy house in Coldwater Canyon with exact replicas of his Manhattan apartment’s piano, where friends Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz play when they visit, and the living room’s emerald velvet sofa to make himself feel more at home. His New York home has sister pieces to most of the art in his Beverly Hills home, including Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley and New Orleans–based painter Harouni.

The soothing charcoal, white, black, and wood palette was intentional. I was paranoid about putting anything that would distract from the home itself,” he says, so he only added houseplants to mimic the greenery through the massive windows.