THE MANSION

In 1971, Hefner bought his iconic 29-room Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles. It became known for its wild parties where female guests were made to observe a lingerieonly dress code. Celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Owen Wilson and Colin Farrell have been spotted at these bashes.

Elvis once spent the night at the mansion, sharing a bed with eight Playmates. It’s the only private home in LA with a fireworks licence and one of the few that has permission to house wild animals. Hefner’s zoo included albino peacocks, African cranes, spider monkeys and cockatoos.

The world got an intimate look into his bizarre world with the six-season reality series The Girls Next Door (also known as The Girls of the Playboy Mansion) which documented Hef’s living arrangements with his girlfriends, including Holly Madison, Bridget Marquardt, and Kendra Wilkinson, who all stayed with him simultaneously – sometimes as many as seven of them under one roof.

But life in the mansion wasn’t nearly as luxurious as it looked. In 2006 Hef’s ex-girlfriend Izabella St. James spilled the beans. “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,” she wrote in her tell-all memoir, Bunny Tales: Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion.

A neighbour bought the mansion last year for $100 million (about R1,4 billion) but agreed to let Hef live there until he died.