
Revamped Playboy Mansion finally finished after five years of renovations under new billionaire owner
Renovations on the infamous Playboy Mansion are finally complete after five years.
Aerial images show the stunning property looking vastly different than before with a brand new cream and aqua blue color scheme.
From some angles, the one debaucherous mansion now resembles a picturesque Disney castle.
The surrounding area boasts an impressive guest house, a cobalt blue tennis court, and perfectly manicured lawns and gardens.
The rear terrace deck appears to have been extended to allow more space for outdoor entertaining.
And to help guests unwind, there's a new 42 by 23-foot solarium.
Underneath the solarium, a new luxury state-of-the-art spa-jacuzzi is believed to be finished.
The spa also includes a 'cold plunge,' favored by celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Lady Gaga and Madonna.
The late Hugh Hefner's legendary home, which served as the backdrop to his Playboy magazine, was sold in January 2016 to Greek-American business mogul Daren Metropoulos for $100million.
Daren, 42, is the son of billionaire businessman Dean Metropoulos, 79.
Daren boasts a packed business portfolio, as he headed companies such as Hostess Brand, which produces snacks like Twinkies and HoHos, and Pabst Brewing Company – both at some point owned by his father.
Dean is a fan of Hefner's fantasy home, as he was photographed partying it up at the 29-room Holmby Hills property in 2012 alongside rapper Snoop Dogg and an entourage of bunnies.
He entrusted the makeover to architect Richard Landry, who has renovated multiple star's houses such as Tom Brady, Kylie Jenner, Rod Stewart, Mark Wahlberg and Sylvester Stallone.
Dean has spent the last 18 years buying up iconic properties, with Realtor.com estimating that the mogul has splashed out around $326million so far.
Outside of the Playboy Mansion, his purchases include $148million on a Mediterranean Revival-style home in Palm Beach, Florida.
'My general approach is very measured and tactical and I am particularly interested in hidden jewel properties that rarely come to market,' he previously told The Wall Street journal.
In addition to owning the $100million Playboy Mansion, Dean also owns a 'miniature' mansion next door worth around $60million.
He has hinted in the past that he plans to combine the two estates.
Building permits filed with the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety at the start of renovations five years ago, showed his intention of remodeling the kitchen, family room bathrooms and powder room in the main house.
When Dean originally bought the mansion in 2016, he allowed Hefner to live out his last days at his beloved mansion. He died the following year at age 91 from sepsis he had developed after he contracted E. coli.
The Playboy Mansion is emblematic of celebrity culture with some of the biggest stars scrambling to enjoy Hefner's lingerie-only dress code for the female guests who cavorted in the caved grotto.
Elvis Presley reportedly slept with eight Playmates at once at the home, while John Lennon burned a Matisse original with a cigarette.
Donald Trump even filmed an episode of The Apprentice at the mansion where contestants got to meet Hefner and his girlfriends.
It also has a dark side, with allegations against disgraced actor Bill Cosby purported to take place during these debauched parties.
Judy Huth claimed Cosby assaulted her when she was 15 at Hugh Hefner's home. Chloe Goins claimed she was assaulted by Crosby at the mansion, but criminal charges in the case were ruled out.
It was also dirty. Multiple former Playboy bunnies spoke out about the dilapidated building and floors being strewn with dog feces and urine.
In 2011, health officials confirmed that the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' disease was found in a whirlpool spa at the Playboy Mansion where more than 100 people fell ill.
The Los Angeles County Health Department presented its findings at an annual conference at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The legionella bacteria also cause a milder illness called Pontiac fever.
Symptoms, which include fever and headache, are the same as those suffered by the Playboy Mansion partygoers.
Building permits, accessed by DailyMail.com in 2023, revealed workmen repaired 'termite and dry-rot damage' from the original wooden framing.
The Playboy mansion sits on five acres adjacent to the Los Angeles Country Club – on Charing Cross Road in the exclusive Holmby Hills neighborhood just off the famous Sunset Boulevard.
The house was designed by Arthur Kelly for Arthur Letts Jr - the son of Arthur Letts who founded The Broadway, a now-defunct department store – and was completed in 1927.
It was purchased by Hefner in 1971 for $1million, becoming the second Playboy Mansion house. The first was a 54-room classical brick and limestone mansion in Chicago's Gold Coast district.
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At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related