OWN Star Destiny Payton Has ‘Weird’ At-Home Ritual To Escape TV Drama

As a real estate agent and reality TV personality, “Love & Marriage: Huntsville” star Destiny Payton is using her profession and public platform to revitalize the Alabama city she calls home.

Payton notes that Huntsville has experienced unprecedented population and economic growth in recent years, with Rocket City soaring to the top of many homebuyers’ wish lists thanks to its affordability and the attractive lifestyle it offers residents.

It is an upward trend that Payton, 40, is hoping will continue, explaining in the latest installment of Celebrity Sanctuary that she and her “Love & Marriage” castmates, many of whom work in real estate or construction, are all pitching in to revitalize their community.

“Everybody individually does their part in bringing the community back, whether it’s building, whether it’s selling, whether it’s rehabbing. I think everybody has their hands in still doing that,” she tells Realtor.com®, before detailing a transaction she just completed that brought her career full circle.

“My last closing was a single mom first-time homebuyer and to be able to be a part of that on the north side of Huntsville and to deliver quality service and quality products with Holt [Custom] Homes—which is another one of my cast members who actually built the home, Martell Holt—I just enjoy being a part of it,” she adds.

“It’s a reminder to me from 20 years ago when I started in real estate as to why, because one of my first sales was a single woman and it was beautiful to see her cry when she walked inside of finally getting the keys to her home.”

In addition to witnessing the emotions of her clients, Payton herself expresses a lot of feelings on Season 11 of the reality TV series, which airs Saturdays on Oprah Winfrey‘s network, OWN, as she takes a personal trip to Detroit to have a deep conversation with her birth mother and meet several of her half-siblings for the first time.

Facing challenges directly is an approach Payton favors, even if the communication strategy sometimes drums up drama in her circle.

“My role, I think I’m the truth teller,” the Madonnni Beauty founder states about her role among the cast. “I’ve always been challenged with that. People don’t like my delivery of the truth or who I’m telling the truth about, but I know myself as a truth teller.”

But when Payton needs to separate herself from daily stress, be it from filming her popular reality show or pounding the pavement for real estate, she retreats to the turnkey townhome she moved into in 2023 that boasts just over 2,000 square feet of living space.

In this edition of Celebrity Sanctuary, Payton explains how the entire three-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom townhouse she shares with her 5-year-old son, Law Ace Williams, serves as a space where she can indulge in restorative self-care, though she reveals it’s her spa-like primary bathroom where she is most able to cleanse away worries and recharge the motivation it takes to level up her hometown—and her own life.

It’s a townhome, and that is my favorite type of home. I fell in love with townhomes in Atlanta when I started selling. That was one of the first products that I sold in Atlanta, where I was first licensed 20 years ago. I feel like it’s classic, quaint. It’s just perfect.

I’m a city girl, so coming back to Huntsville, I needed to feel like I was in the city. I chose an area that [is] a MUD—it’s a mixed-use development—so I can go outside of my home, I can ground in the grass, and then I can walk around the corner and go get ice cream.

I can walk to the baseball stadium. I can go to a 4- or 5-star restaurant all in walking distance, which makes me feel like I’m in a city versus living on the outskirts and living in the subdivisions. I need to feel like I’m in the city so that’s why I chose it. 

[Sanctuary] means a place where I can go and recharge, dream, heal, create, just an elevated space. Right now, my sanctuary is my bathroom and my tub. 

It’s very light. Nothing special. It’s a lot of whites. The shower and the bath is white. The tile is white, the fixtures are stainless steel colors, and then because I love gold, I’ve incorporated some gold things in there as well.

I have a marble trash can, I have marble toothbrush holders, and marble everything that is, like, extra aesthetics. 

There’s a lot of fragrances—I’m a fragrance girly and it’s just clean. Clean with soft lights. 

I always have my candles because I have a candle line, Madonni candles. I have them everywhere and especially on my tub. That’s a part of my ritual when I get in my bathroom, even in the shower.

I light a candle, turn all the lights off, get in the shower, and I just have the beautiful aroma and the ambiance of the candle wicker, which [are] the wood burning ones. It makes it seem like I have a little fire going on and I just relax. That’s why my bathroom is my favorite place. 

A perfect day in my sanctuary would be coming home, lighting my candles, running a bubble bath. I’m weird; I get in the shower before I take a bath. I take a quick little shower and then I like to soak because I feel like you don’t want to soak in your dirt. You want to clean and then take a bath, so that’s what I do. 

I sit there and I let [the water] get cold and then I re-run hot water and put more bubbles in it and sit there a little bit longer. That’s a perfect day for me and that’s maybe a couple hours.

Those rechargeable bubble baths with my tray, with my candle lit, with my wine, with my grapes or cheese or whatever I have for the day—to just sit there and relax or just listen to music while I’m relaxing as well, it’s a part of keeping my sanity on top of therapy.

I don’t like anybody enough for them to be in my sanctuary. It’s my sanctuary for a reason. We gotta keep that separate.

I have my mantras and my motivational things in my bathroom as well. I have some of my mantras framed on the wall so that when I’m brushing my teeth or washing my face, I always have a reminder. I also have a framed check—the check that I want to see this year in 2026 earnings.

I definitely want to make some changes. I’m definitely going to put shelves in. I actually had someone come over and look just a couple weeks ago about adding more shelves so that I can move fragrances.

I have Madonni body mist as well, so as I’m curating more fragrances, that’s taking up my counter space. I was thinking about moving it out of there altogether and just having a whole content room because my fragrances are taking over a little bit.

I [also] plan on making my backyard more of my sanctuary, but that’s the only thing that I plan on putting some extra oomph into.

As far as real estate goes, I am about to take my broker’s license, so I’m upgrading my experience in real estate by adding those letters to the end of my name as a broker.

I am a representation of resilience. I’ve been in survival mode for so long and now I feel like finally I’m getting to the cusp of thriving and not just surviving.