SELL BUY PROPERTY

SELLER: Hugh Hefner/Playboy Enterprises
LOCATION: Los Angeles, CA
PRICE: $11,000,000
SIZE: 6,690 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 6.5 bathrooms

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama is nine kinds of terrified of the dentist. We really are. In fact, we are so freaked out by the idea of having our teeth touched that we have to load up on prescription medication just to get through the office's 1970s modern front door. Just ask our bossy but beloved Sister Woman who—bless her heart—will actually sit in the exam room as Your Mama's eyes, ears and insurance that our dentist—deftly skilled and rakishly handsome but still a dentist—will not purposely inflict harm on our ever-so-tender chompers. Unfortunately for the children, an early a.m. visit to said handsome dentist has left Your Mama at the woozy mercy of a heavy duty Valley Girl* and the pesky residue of laughing gas so we have to ask that y'all try to forgive us our celebrity real estate transgressions and digressive story telling tangents today, such as the one some of you just suffered through reading this paragraph...

Anyhoo, even before we left for the dentist at the crack of dawn this morning Your Mama had already received several missives and communiques from a handful of informants who let us know about the newly listed Bunny Hutch in Los Angeles's high fallutin' Holmby Hills area that just hopped on the market with an $11,000,000 price tag.

We call it the "Bunny Hutch" because the South Mapleton Drive mini-mansion, located a short hop down and across the the street from the back door service entrance to the illustrious Playboy Mansion, is where, for more than a decade, octogenarian playboy Hugh Hefner has housed dozens of bouncy and unnaturally busty young women who put on their pouty and/or sultry faces and pose butt-ass naked for the racy men's magazine and its various other digital soft-core porn products.

As best as Your Mama can tell the Bunny Hutch was picked up by a corporate entity in June 2001 for $4,500,000. If Your Mama is being totally honest—and we always are—we'd confess that we're not sure if the property is owned directly by Mister Hefner or—more likely—if it's an asset of Playboy Enterprises, much or all of which has been owned by a private investment outfit (Icon Acquisition Group) since 2011. We're sure there are about 49,000 people out there who could more accurately articulate the ownership nuances of this property and perhaps one of them will be so kind to send Your Mama and email to let us know.

Listing details show the 6,690 square foot two level 1950s ranch-style residence sits on 1.3 acres and, in addition to all the usually living and dining rooms, has five bedrooms and 6.5 bathrooms. The bed/bath count definitely includes the two master suites and may or may not include the staff bedroom and bathroom that—natch—adjoins the laundry room.

Regardless of the number of bedrooms Your Mama imagines they are all done up dormitory style with stuffed animal and hair extension strewn bunk beds and twice-patched air mattresses in the bedrooms and a couple of uncomfortable camping cots pushed up against the wall in a dark hallway where the naughty or less favored hares are made to sleep by the house's big bunny who sets and upholds the house rules. Gawd, children, can y'all imagine if it really was that political up in the Bunny Hutch? The potential for on-going, daily drama would be thick and damp like a steamy, late summer afternoon in Okalona, Mississippi. (No thank you but thank you, Bobbie Gentry.)

An upper level living room/lounge has wall-to-wall carpeting—ew!—plus a red and white abstract pattern rug that looks like it could be from Ikea and is grossly under-scaled for the room. There's a built-in bar with two styles of bar stools including four with Playboy logo bunny head backs and, in front of a wide, slightly bowed window, a silver leather polka-dot sofa that might possibly be a super-sized George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa although never in all Your Mama's many days have we ever seen one that long.

On the lower level, a second living room/lounge opens directly to the backyard entertainment areas and has more wall-to-wall carpeting—and more ew!—a wide banks of nearly floor-to-ceiling windows and at least one, arcade grade video game machine and at least one pinball machine because, let's be honest children, is there anything hotter than a bikini clad bunny working the paddles of a pinball machine? Is there? And, although it's way, way, way under proportioned for what appears to be a fairly large space, the one saving decorative grace, based on all that's shown in the single listing photograph of the room, is the Space Age-y sputnik light fixture.

The lagoon-like swimming pool and spa has trendy beach entry and a man-made rock waterfall situation that's clearly second fiddle to the major pile of (faux) boulders that form the (in)famous grotto at the Playboy Mansion. We're not saying every single one of those bunnies and their house guests aren't squeaky clean top to bottom and front to back but let's just say Your Mama wouldn't dream of swimming in that pool or even walking barefooted around the damn thing. It may be unnecessarily crude to mention this but, children, pleeze, imagine the fluid swapping that has gone on in and around that pool and spa the last dozen years that house has been Playboy's bunny hutch.**

To be honest with y'all the property looks a bit on the scungy side for a house in this particular neck of hoity toity L.A. The neighbors probably hate it. The privacy hedge at the front looks a little unkempt—and not in the good way; The driveway gates looks like they would benefit from a coat of paint; the black top driveway and motor court appears to be in need of some attention and the landscaping at the front (and back) the house has neither pizazz nor even any real aesthetic value. Did y'all take note the broken down vertical blinds in the upper level windows at the rear of the residence? Do we even need to say they're utterly and unspeakably tawdry? No, we didn't, did we? Who puts vertical blinds in a house in Holmby Hills? Seriously? That is just wrong on every level. Never-the-less,  lackluster landscaping and vertical blinds aside, Holmby Hills is still one of the most expensive and prestigious nooks in all the upper end crannies of Los Angeles and Your Mama would guess the land alone is worth a substantial portion of the current asking price but we'll let the local real estate experts duke out the value of the land in the comments. One, two, three...go!


*That's old-school street talk for Valium, children.


listing photos: Shirley Lovitt