‘Shahs of Sunset’ Star Mercedes ‘MJ’ Javid on How Moving to a New Home With Her Son Helped Her Find a Fresh Start Amid Divorce

"Shahs of Sunset" star Mercedes “MJ” Javid has made a variety of life-changing moves lately, with filing for divorce, returning to reality TV, and relocating to a new Los Angeles-area home base. 

Yet, amid all those changes, what hasn’t shifted is how she prioritizes her son Shams, almost 7, and her longtime career as a real estate agent.

Catering to the needs of her kid and clients, Javid, 53, explains in the latest installment of Celebrity Sanctuary, remains her focus no matter her new address or relationship status.

“I picked up and I reset,” says Javid. “The difference would be that I'm separated now, but everything else is the same.”

Javid first joined the Bravo universe in 2012 as an original cast member of “Shahs of Sunset.” Over the course of nine seasons, the series highlighted the lives, relationships, and shared culture of Javid and her tight-knit clique of Persian-American friends.

For MJ, that meant sharing several major personal moments on camera, including mourning the loss of her beloved father and marrying Tommy Feight within the span of a few months in 2018, and giving birth to Shams a year later in April 2019.

Becoming parents ultimately motivated Javid and Feight to leave their home in lively West Hollywood, CA, for one in the suburban San Fernando Valley.

In December 2019, they settled into a five-bedroom, four-bathroom, 3,600-square-foot midcentury abode in Woodland Hills, CA, that would eventually be featured on their latest reality TV series, “The Valley: Persian Style,” which debuted in January.

“We [were] not in our party era. We [were] in our parents era, so we decided to move where there's parks and grass and we had no idea how much we were going to love it,” admits Javid. “We had no idea how much we were going to be so partial to it that we didn't even want to go back for lunch in the city.”

Through a move and new motherhood, Javid continued filming “Shahs of Sunset.” She also kept up her work in real estate, both during the show’s run and after it ended in 2021.

However, that aspect of her life was often left out of episodes in favor of more dramatic storylines with costars, including longtime friend and fellow real estate agent Reza Farahan, whom MJ says she learned a great deal from while tagging along to broker-only open houses when she first got her real estate license in 2004.

“We would shoot a lot of real estate on ‘Shahs’ and then it wouldn’t make it in the final cut because, of course, if there was a drink thrown at a party, that would be more clickbait than showing us selling multimillion dollar homes,” she explains. 

“It did get really discouraging to see some of the things that I did that I was really proud of not make the episodes of those seasons of ‘Shahs,’” she adds. “It quietly faded into the sunset of ‘Shahs of Sunset.’

"The reality of ‘Shahs’ was that it was a show that focused on highlighting our lives, but sometimes it didn’t lean into the whole picture.”

When opportunity knocked to publicly share her life again on “The Valley: Persian Style,” Javid accepted the offer—with a contingency. This time around, Javid made sure the spotlight was on her journey as a working mom who’s building her business at The Agency, the global boutique real estate brokerage founded by Mauricio Umansky.

“I am determined to show what takes up most of the time in my life,” she states.

Because Calabasas, CA, is where Javid spends most of her days shuttling Shams to and from school and working out of The Agency’s satellite office there, the location made the most sense for MJ to move to at the end of 2025 following her separation from Feight after seven years of marriage.

In this edition of Celebrity Sanctuary, Javid reveals to Realtor.com® she’s now renting an airy two-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom, 1,450-square-foot townhouse that’s central to her work and home life.

Though she specifically points to her bed and sofa as the most comfortable spots in her new home, Javid shares how she intentionally used familiar decor and an identical aesthetic to her previous place to create a consistently comforting environment that supports a fresh start with her son.

I moved very close. I moved to Calabasas proper. I moved to a townhouse in a gated community. It's really close to my kid’s school and my office with The Agency, Calabasas.

I'm in a two-[bedroom], 2.5-[bathroom] and it's about 1,450 [square feet]. I have a cute two-car [garage]. It’s cute. It’s great. It's lovely. It's very different. It feels like a steppingstone for this new chapter. And to be very personal and open, it was a choice that was kind of like when you break up with a boyfriend and your first date is like the polar opposite. It's a Spanish white aesthetic [with] really high ceilings.

I love the idea of moving because you do get into the habit of purging anything that shouldn't be in your life. I love the idea of starting anew because when you have a new space, you do have to pick up every single thing that you own and decide if it's coming with you.

I was really decisive and specific about what I was gonna bring from my old house to the new house. If I picked up an object, it was really important that it wanted to come with me and should come with me. It had to be the same color palette of creamy whites, a lot of different textures and shades of off-whites. Not whites, though. Earth tones.

It's important every little thing, I strongly believe, if it doesn't serve you, you just get in the habit of donating, or just get it out of your space.

I'm really, really sentimental about keeping [specific belongings]. There are certain things from each house that I live in, I will hang right on my nightstand. Things that Shams made or the same photos. Certain things that travel together and it's like that piece of home.

A lot of my rooms always feel the same no matter where I live because it's always creamy earth tones. Really, really light neutral tones.

When you look at a beachscape, it's always white sand, sky. That's what I want to capture when I'm in my living space. It's the opposite of masculine energy with the dark tones and the cigar rooms.

My bed and my sofa [are my sanctuaries]. I love my Crate & Barrel, 10-foot long [sofa]. It's a [similar] texture of bouclé. It just makes me feel like I'm home. Wherever I go, the energy is so good that I take a piece of my heart, so it's like I still know where I am.

One of the most important things for my house is that people can spill and have fun in it and not worry. A house has to be cozy and it has to be comfortable for everyone there. 

For example, this one time I [visited] my girlfriend who had just newly gotten married. She was so proud of herself and she was so proud of her Restoration Hardware sofa that she would literally wipe under people's drinks while they were taking a bite of a crumpet and it was so off-putting to me that somebody would be so rude.

I was like, “Where's your etiquette? Where's your hospitality? This is not how you entertain and invite people into your home to make them feel uncomfortable.” 

So, my first priority with all interiors is that it's going to be the creamy Tulum vibes. It's always the light-colored furniture and I will buy a rug that I can afford to replace twice a year because I know that I want people to live. I want people to come over and take a load off. My kid can have a spill, play with his trucks. My dog can scratch.

Also, my mom and my husband, we're all very rough around the edges so when somebody comes over, I just want to make sure that I'm hosting a comfortable space more than I want the house to feel like someone's entering a museum.

Sanctuary to me would be a place where the outside world is quiet and I can be fully relaxed. I can feel calm and safe, where laughter is the best medicine. I only want to hear my son and I laughing. We're allowed to clunk around and be comfortable and we can just recharge.

To me, sanctuary is where I can shut off everything that is outside of the walls of my home. It has to be peaceful, calm. It has to be light, which is, a lot of natural light. There has to be living plants. I am more of a plant person than [a] cut flowers person because those are still living and flowers are dead basically because you cut them.

I consulted a feng shui expert to help me calibrate the direction of the sun and the direction of [my] bed. A lot of those things I believe in spiritually.

When you work in real estate, in a way you have to be on call at all hours. You definitely don’t get weekends off. 

As a mother, I don’t want to miss pickup or drop-off for my kid. I want to be there at practice. I want to be there for the games, so I’m really just determined to do everything to the best of my ability. I don’t want anyone to feel like they’re getting cheated.

Dedicated is what I feel all the time. I feel so much passion about quality of life. That includes the way that I show up for my clients, and it’s the same way that I want to make sure I show up for my son. It’s like you want to make sure that every interaction is meaningful because we’re so busy, but the last thing that we want to do is seem too busy for somebody in our lives.

It’s a boundary. When I get home from work, when I get home from the day, it's a conscious boundary between professional and personal and it's important to be present.

When you do work so hard and you do everything for a client, there has to be a time when you stop and make sure your phone’s away and your eyes are on your baby. They notice. They know the difference. When you have such a demanding career, home truly has to signal that family comes first. That separation is perfect for me because then he knows he's got me.

Right now I am resetting. I feel very brave in making the changes to start anew and set new goals, and my goals and my dreams are enormous. I have to have a lot of intention behind what I want in life and what I want to create for our future, for my family. I do really feel like it's a new chapter. Life isn't always easy, but it seems like it's a door that I have to walk through.