Home of married film and TV producers showcases family, South African art

When Bree and Chuck West began their courtship, they knew they wanted to stay in the Washington, D.C., area.

It was the best place for the couple to nurture both their new blended family — Bree, 50, was a divorced mother of four girls, and Chuck, 58, was raising two sons and two nephews — and their nascent television and film production company, OCTET Productions.

Married in 2020, they settled in Potomac, Maryland.

Their five-bedroom, 6,100-square-foot house was built in the late 1980s and sits on 2½ acres. It has soaring ceilings and expansive windows. In the spring and summer, the view outside the large bow window in the great room is a curtain of leaves.

“There’s usually leaves everywhere when you look outside; it’s full and green,” Bree West said. “So when you’re sitting here, you kind of feel like you’re in a treehouse. The energy is really, really good.”

That “energy” is what sold them on the house, Chuck West said. “When we were looking at homes, we saw quite a few,” he said, explaining that with other houses, “there was something that we didn’t like.”

“But as soon as we walked in here, it was like, ‘We can work with this one,’” he said. “We loved the openness.”

They moved into the home in 2017.

The great room, with its unobstructed view of the treetops, is their favorite space in the house. It’s anchored by a large deep-ocean-blue sectional with reclining seats, big enough to accommodate the West crew for watching a movie on the big-screen television or enjoying crackling logs in the fireplace surrounded by rustic stones stacked to the ceiling.

Popping off the gray rocks is a large, mixed-media piece that features a mold of a male torso and abstract shapes painted in bright red, orange, yellow and purple by Sofalé, an artist based in Washington, D.C.

But the biggest art influence in their home is South Africa.

The Wests brought back several colorful pieces from a trip last year to South Africa, where they were shooting a film. The gray and blue neutrals of their walls and furnishings in the home’s common areas offer a perfect backdrop for the art.

A photograph of a pair of feet, ankles adorned with silver bangles, wading through water, reminds the Wests of their own experience running their company while raising eight children.

“I love that piece because it’s about just moving forward,” Bree West said, referring to the print by South African photographer David Ballam. “Just putting one foot in front of the other regardless of what’s happening.”

In an instance of art imitating life and life imitating art, the Wests’ holiday film franchise follows the fictional Wesley family: The surname is a play on the Wests’ last name, and the Wesleys live in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where the couple grew up.

They have produced “A Wesley Christmas,” “A Wesley Christmas Wedding” and “A Wesley South African Christmas” for BET. Bree West said the Wesleys represent Black Americans whose lives have been historically overlooked in popular media. The NAACP has recognized the work with nominations for its Image Awards. “I think it’s so important for our country to see that there are Black families who are educated, accomplished professionally and navigating life” without falling victim to social pathologies, she said.

OCTET Productions won its first jury award at last year’s Essence Film Festival, for best narrative feature for the rom-com “A Kismet Holiday.” Chazitear, director of development for OCTET, directed and co-wrote, with Bree West, the film about a couple who fall in love after a random encounter. (Bree and Chuck West met in 2013 at a party hosted by their mutual friend Biz Markie, the rapper who died in 2021.)

Chuck West, who got his start producing Broadway and urban stage plays, flashed a wide smile as he showed it off.

Bree West joined the business in 2015, the same year they started OCTET, as the co-executive producer of a Lifetime biopic of Wanda Durant, mother of NBA star Kevin Durant. In 2023, she added director to her resume when she helmed an episode of “Hush,” a drama series that OCTET produces for the streaming service Allblk.

The centerpiece of the living room is the black baby grand Yamaha that Bree West’s father gave her when she was about 8. Her father told her that she would grow up to be a famous singer, but she said she had more fun using the piano for show tunes for the weekly Broadway plays she would put on with her two sisters and two friends.

They would use jump ropes, bedsheets and safety pins to rig up a curtain for the stage. “We would do ‘Annie’ and ‘The Wiz,’” she said, adding that she now realizes she was getting an early start on her career as a producer and director.

Hanging above the piano is a painting the Wests bought in Johannesburg from an artist selling his work on the side of the road. It depicts a girl in a bright yellow dress, carrying a green bucket. Bree West imagines the girl is on her way to take care of an important task, maybe to fetch water or food. “This is a special piece because it represents girl power. She’s got her bucket, and I feel she’s going to go get it,” Bree West said.

A pair of Ballam’s photos showing Mumuila tribal members wearing elaborate, colorful necklaces hang in the couple’s dining room.

The Wests, who often work with students studying the film industry at historically Black colleges and universities, say the South African project is one of their most rewarding professional experiences.

Sharing with and learning from other Black professionals in Africa was “very special to us,” Chuck West said — so much so that when the couple work from home, they make it a point to conduct video conferences in the dining room.

“We like to do our Zoom calls with our warriors behind us,” he said.

Potomac is far away from the entertainment industry’s traditional hubs in Los Angeles and Atlanta, but the Wests say shooting in the Washington area means less competition from other filmmakers. More importantly, staying in the area enabled their children to grow up with both sets of parents.

A hallway between the dining room and the kitchen is filled with family photos that capture the growing stages of their children, who now range in age from 17 to 32. The youngest, Dylan, is a high school senior who will be off to the University of San Francisco this fall.

“These pictures,” Bree West said, show “how we blended our family through the years.”

Chuck West said the merger went more smoothly than they expected.

“Right off the bat, they all acted like sisters and brothers. It was so crazy, very natural,” he said. “We are very spiritual. We feel like things happen when they’re supposed to happen. It was kind of like a sign for us.

“They kind of gave us confirmation,” he began, and then his wife jumped in to finish the thought, “that this could be a thing.”