Playboy Mansion

The Playboy Mansion, also known as the Playboy Mansion West, is the former home of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner, who lived there from 1971 until his death in 2017. Barbi Benton convinced Hefner to buy the home located in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California, near Beverly Hills. From the 1970s onward, the mansion became the location of lavish parties held by Hefner which were often attended by celebrities and socialites. It is currently owned by Daren Metropoulos, the son of billionaire investor Dean Metropoulos, and is used for corporate activities. It also serves as a location for television production, magazine photography, charitable events, and civic functions.

Hefner established the original Playboy Mansion in 1959. It was a brick and limestone residence in Chicago's Gold Coast, which had been built in 1899. Hefner had founded Playboy in Chicago in 1953. After he permanently relocated to California in 1975, his company eventually leased the mansion for a nominal rent to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then donated it to the school outright. The school later sold the mansion, which was then redeveloped for luxury condominiums.

The 21,987-square-foot (2,042.7 m²) house is described as being in the "Gothic-Tudor" style of architecture by Forbes magazine, and sits on 5.3 acres (2.1 ha). It was designed by Arthur R. Kelly in 1927 as Holmby House for Arthur Letts Jr., son of The Broadway department store founder Arthur Letts.

The estate was acquired by Playboy Enterprises (as with the earlier Chicago Mansion, Hefner nominally rented his living accommodations from the company, which also designated the homes as promotional facilities) in 1971 for $1.05 million (equivalent to $8.2 million in 2024). Its previous owner was Louis D. Statham (1908–1983), a foundational biomedical engineer and prominent chess aficionado who had acquired the estate in 1961 before implementing a two-year renovation program and thence divesting the property in the broader context of the 1965 death of his first wife, Anne, a socially prominent figure known for her membership in the Southern California Symphony Association and past presidencies of the Beverly Hills Women's Club and the Beverly Hills Garden Club. As Statham had largely relocated to the rural Owens Valley enclave of Lone Pine, California (where he would host and endow the annual Lone Pine International chess tournament) in the wake of her death, the estate (now known as Statham House) was primarily utilized throughout the late 1960s by the Les Dames de Champagne hospitality group, composed of socialites who served as a "welcoming committee" for visiting dignitaries in Los Angeles; Statham (who shared his late wife's penchant for classical music) sang a selection from The Magic Flute at one of the group's annual masked balls during this period. In early 2011, it was valued at $54 million. It sits close to the northwestern corner of the Los Angeles Country Club, near the University of California, Los Angeles and the Bel-Air Country Club. Following the company's acquisition of the property, $15 million was invested in renovation and expansion. Although greatly augmented, much of the Statham-era staff (including more than a dozen gardeners and property superintendent Dick Hall, who would emerge as an integral project-management stakeholder throughout the estate's 1970s renovations) was retained by Playboy Enterprises, often for decades.

During Hefner's 46 years in residence, the main house encompassed 29 rooms, including five guest bedrooms (routinely housing such "Rabbit Pack" mainstays as James Caan, Bill Cosby, Tony Curtis, Max Lerner and Hefner's best friend John Dante for indefinite [and typically extended] periods throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these bedrooms later domiciled Hefner's retinue of girlfriends in the 2000s; by this juncture, corporate controls ensured that the publisher was required to pay tens of thousands of dollars of rent per month to Playboy Enterprises for their accommodations); the two-story Great Hall (with 22-foot ceilings and staircases leading directly from the entrance area to the second floor); a catering kitchen (with walk-in refrigerator and freezer), butler's pantry, Regency era-inspired dining room and adjacent, breakfast-oriented Mediterranean Room (colloquially characterized as the "Med Room"; while Hefner continued to hew to the Chicago Mansion's tradition of 24-hour food service at Playboy Mansion West, non-menu orders at the latter facility were explicitly contingent on available resources); a wine cellar (with a Prohibition-era secret door); a library (frequently utilized as a formal meeting room and backgammon/Monopoly-oriented gaming space by Hefner, who instead stored the preponderance of his media collections in his suite/office); and a living room with a built-in pipe organ that increasingly functioned as a dedicated screening room (replete with projection facilities added by Hefner, who continued his Chicago-era tradition of showing first-release films during a Sunday evening buffet dinner alongside similar events oriented around other films and major boxing matches) throughout Playboy's era of ownership. The house also contained six full bathrooms and two half-bathrooms, some of which were en suite in Hefner's bedroom and the other guest bedrooms. The servants' quarters in the west wing were reconfigured to house various administrative offices, including several on the second floor that were occupied by longtime Hefner majordomo Mary O'Connor, social secretary/former Playmate Joni Mattis and other key members of Hefner's personal staff.

In addition, the estate featured several outbuildings and external amenities, including an aviary (featuring an array of birds, lizards and exotic flora alongside tropical aquaria) derived from the property's original trio of greenhouses (the main aviary was the principal greenhouse, which housed a rare orchid collection maintained by Anne Statham); one of the only private licensed zoos in the United States (replete with several primate enclosures and reportedly envisioned in part by Hefner to rankle the members and guests of the adjacent Los Angeles Country Club [which had refused to admit him following his migration to the West Coast], it was completed in the early 1980s after a decade of more improvisatory post-licensing accommodations in the aviary, backyard and redwood forest); a four-room guest house that was initially decorated by Barbi Benton in an early Americana motif (originally offering comparatively minimalistic, Holiday Inn-style accommodations for visiting models and various figures in Hefner's extended social orbit, it was later remodeled by Holly Madison in a Playboy-centric theme exemplified by decorated bedrooms inspired by the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Pamela Anderson); a Hefner-stipulated sunken tennis court with a stone-adorned, chaise longue-suffused bar/lounge area (completed by the spring of 1972 but no longer extant in its original form, the court itself was long favored by Timothy Leary for practicing yoga, while longtime Playboy Enterprises architect Ron Dirsmith extolled the bar/lounge area as his favorite part of the Hefner-era estate, in part due to its optimal vantage for sunsets and relative tranquility amid the bustle of the main house and its immediately adjacent amenities) and then-atypical wind-minimizing landscaping (attracting hundreds of Hollywood-oriented charitable events and visits from such venerable talents as Pancho Gonzales, it also was frequently employed as an ad hoc roller rink/basketball court/miscellaneous event space by the late 1970s); the backyard's celebrated waterfall/swimming pool area (finished by Dirsmith's team in early September 1971 upon adhering to a four month deadline spontaneously imposed by Hefner, it included large stone outcroppings alongside a patio and outdoor kitchen/barbecue area facing the pool; embedded alongside the outcroppings, a publicly surreptitious grotto connected the pool to several then-au courant hot tubs with unprecedented "hydrotherapy" capabilities in a diaphanously lit environment germane to Hefner's epochal group sex preoccupations; while a 1980s-era basement gym was added [likely to appease Hefner's then-partner Carrie Leigh] below the bathhouse, which included several early-to-mid-1970s-era dressing rooms with stone-encased showers, an oversized sauna, tanning beds and a lounging area). Extensive landscaping shielded the property from the adjacent Los Angeles Country Club and was exemplified by the likes of a large koi pond with an artificial stream, a small citrus orchard and two well-established forests of tree ferns and redwoods (the latter was ultimately developed with nearly a mile of walkways).

Initially coterminous with the main bedroom and bathroom, Hefner's personal suite retained the Queen Anne style furniture and floridly verdant color schemes effectuated by Anne Statham during much of his "bicoastal" period; however, it was gradually redecorated in a more masculine style and had been outfitted with large CRT projector televisions (alongside the customary array of secondary televisions and advanced video and stereo equipment) by early 1975. A finished attic added thousands of square feet of personal office and storage space in the half-decade thereafter, culminating in the addition of an extensive and painstakingly developed carved-oak decor in the office and bedroom installed circa 1980. Otherwise, the mansion proper was maintained in its original Gothic Revival furnishings for the most part. The pipe organ was extensively restored in the last decade.^[when?] These features and others have been shown on television.

Located on the north side of the property, the game house outbuilding was added by the Stathams as a playhouse for their grandchildren before serving as Statham's office (including a meeting room, trophy room and the earliest iteration of the game room) by the late 1960s. It was favored by many Mansion West visitors and habitués, often functioning as a relatively isolate oasis of sexual ribaldry and drug use among "Rabbit Pack" or "Gang List" affiliates during protracted formal events and Hefner family visits. There were two sidewalks from the fountain in front of the main entrance, running past a wishing well. A path on the right led to the game house and ran past a duplicate Hollywood Walk of Fame star of Hefner. Its front entrance opened to a game room with a pool table in the center (the table was once employed by Hefner "frenemy" Al Goldstein for a notable 1980s-era assignation allegedly powered by a Canter's pastrami sandwich, also reportedly serving as the emplacement where Harry Reems anally penetrated Hefner during a threesome with Sondra Theodore in the late 1970s). Ostensibly patterned after the Chicago Mansion's game room (an area in fact distinguished by its relative dearth of sexual activity amid Hefner's stringently styled, dextroamphetamine-adjacent gaming interludes of the late 1960s and early 1970s), it contained vintage and modern arcade games and pinball machines (including some that were originally housed at the Chicago Mansion) in addition to a player piano, jukebox, television, stereo, and couch. The remainder of the outbuilding was devoted to several small bedrooms which frequently hosted impromptu sexual encounters. The left wing contained a sexually propitious "alcove room" (later primarily characterized as the "van room" due to its resemblance to an internally customized Dodge Ram Van of the 1970s) reportedly customized circa 1979 with a television, en suite bathroom and a soft-cushioned floor (possibly of vanguard construction in the 1970s, 2000s-era visitors reported its abject lack of comfortability during extended "scenes") surrounded by unabashedly voyeuristic wall-to-wall mirrors. The right wing of the game house has a smaller restroom and entrance to a bedroom. This bedroom was connected to another bedroom (both featured sprawling ceiling mirrors and were frequently employed for ephemeral trysts during parties), which had an exit that faced a rear yard maintained with lounge chairs and gates on both sides.