Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion has hit the market with a list price of
$200 million, making it the most expensive completed home currently for
sale in the U.S.The nearly 20,000-square-foot mansion is on five acres in Holmby Hills, a neighborhood that together with Bel Air and Beverly Hills form what is known as Los Angeles’ Platinum Triangle. The Playboy property features 29 rooms and an additional four-bedroom guest house. It is one of only a handful of Los Angeles homes with its own zoo license. Drew Fenton and Gary Gold of Hilton & Hyland and Mauricio Umansky of The Agency are the listing agents.
With prices for speculative homes being announced far before the homes are actually complete and move-in ready, and many high-end offerings kept off the Multiple Listings Service, it has become increasingly difficult to track which home is in fact the priciest on offer at any given time. Hefner’s Playboy estate appears to be the most expensive finished home currently on the market. But two unfinished Los Angeles properties aim to meet or best the Playboy Mansion’s price. A 100,000-square-foot mansion under construction in Bel Air by luxury developer Nile Niami is being marketed with a listing price of $500 million. That home reportedly won’t be completed until 2017. Another luxury developer, Mohamed Hadid, has reportedly said he will price the 30,000-square-foot mansion he is building at $200 million.
Though the Playboy Mansion is a finished home, it might not actually be move-in ready. Former Hefner “girlfriends” have described the house itself as dated and tired. Model Carla Howe told a British tabloid that Hefner ‘almost never leaves home and refuses to change anything in the mansion — the whole place feels like it’s stuck in the 1980s.’ She reportedly described old phones hanging on the mansion walls, and bedrooms that smell damp and feel cold. Former girlfriend Izabella St James wrote in her 2010 book Bunny Tales:”Everything in the Mansion felt old and stale, and Archie the house dog would regularly relieve himself on the hallway curtains, adding a powerful whiff of urine to the general scent of decay.”
In fact, the property’s size and location may be its strongest selling point. Another unique component of this offering: Hefner, the 89-year-old founder of Playboy, is still living and working in his famed mansion, and the sale would be structured so that he could continue doing so. He is reportedly very frail.
Parties at the Playboy Mansion often highlighted the Playboy Grotto, the mansion’s artificial cave with a whirlpool spa. Listing materials point out that the property also has the usual high-end features of a catering kitchen, wine cellar, and home theater, as well as a gym, tennis court, and swimming pool.
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