Playboy Mansion Selling to Its Wealthy Neighbor

After the famous (infamous?) Playboy Mansion in upper-crust neighborhood of Holmby Hills hit the market in January asking $200 million, interested parties from Larry Flynt to a nightclub mogul expressed a desire to buy that was often accompanied by low-ball offers. But they were all bested by a financier who happens to live next door—the Wall Street Journal says he's in contract to buy the place for an as-of-yet undisclosed amount.

A rep for the buyer, Daren Metropoulos of the firm Metropoulos & Co., says that Metropoulos is "passionate about the neighborhood’s architecture." The new buyer lives in a house that he bought from Hugh Hefner in 2009, paying $18 million. Metropoulos is agreeing to one of the odder terms of the sale, that Hefner gets to live out the rest of his days in the mansion; eventually, the buyer's plan is to join the two properties into one massive, 7.3-acre compound.

The Playboy Mansion was built in 1927 for Arthur Letts Jr., the son of the founder of Holmby Hills. Playboy and Hefner bought the mansion in 1971 for $1.05 million, reportedly making it the largest real estate transaction in LA's history at the time. When the house initially came up for sale earlier this year, one of the listing agents said that the land value of the property alone was about $100 million.

The approximately 20,000-square-foot mansion has 29 rooms (12 of them bedrooms, says WSJ), and sits on about five acres. The grounds include a four-bedroom guesthouse with its own solarium and that famed swimming pool/grotto area. And when the property eventually trades hands, its zoo permit—a rarity among private residences in LA—will transfer to the new owner.

• Playboy Mansion’s Neighbor to Buy the Property [WSJ]
• Everything to Know About the Bonkers $200M Playboy Mansion Listing [Curbed LA]
• The Secret High-Society History of the Playboy Mansion [Curbed LA]

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