The Hilton family homestead sold to an unknown buyer for $61.5 million on May 14, according to the MLS.
The 15,000-square-foot Los Angeles house is where a 19-year-old Paris Hilton, navigating the throes of trauma, posed for the NSFW “Paris Hilton: Grandma Hilton’s house” Vanity Fair photo in 2000.
Owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton (Paris’ grandfather) for 60 years, the 13-bedroom, five-bathroom, 12-partial bathroom home also played host to family Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas parties, according to Paris’s brother Barron in a listing video.
The 3 a.m. photoshoot
At age 19, fresh out of the infamous Provo Canyon school, Paris Hilton and photographer David LaChapelle shot photos for a Vanity Fair profile at her grandparents’ house till 3 a.m., as she tells it in her documentary “This is Paris.”
“Totally. Like, we’ll climb the gate. I don’t care. I’ll open it,” Paris said when LaChapelle suggested shooting there, she said in her documentary.
The photo where she flips the bird in a fishnet top, sunglasses, pink gloves, a pink skirt and black heels last sold for $16,250, according to Phillips. Paris said in her documentary that because it was before “The Simple Life,” it was “basically how the world got to know me.”
“Maybe inside my mind I was thinking like, what I was doing in the picture was like a big [expletive] you,” said Paris in her documentary of that time in her life. “I think all my anger just went into my drive for success. It made me strong.”
Her mother called LaChapelle, whom Paris described as one of the most iconic photographers in the world, “freaking out” about the photo, which made Paris upset and scared, she said.
“[But] I think deep down I just knew this was iconic,” she said in the documentary. She attributes the picture to her rise to fame in her 2005 book, “Confessions of an Heiress.”
Paris revisited the white-painted brick house for her documentary “This is Paris,” where shots featured a marble statue, her dog Diamond running around the perfectly manicured lawn, and Paris walking over dark wood floors in the entry.
The living room has been redecorated with green and white. An ivory-colored piano from the photoshoot can still be seen today, as can glimpses of intricate millwork.
“He [LaChapelle] wanted it to be a strong picture. I’m just like posing, like, whatever, and I think he wanted to provoke me. There was a moment where he looked at me and just said like, ‘[Expletive] you’ as a joke. And then me going back, and I was like… And that was the shot he used. Just that one instant,” she recalls in the living room.
Barron Hilton purchased the home for $475,000 around 1961, which is about $4.3 million today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Under Barron’s ownership, he filled the home with guns and model airplanes, according to People.
The home was designed in the English Georgian style by history-making black architect Paul R. Williams in 1936 for the founder of CBS, Jay Paley, who paid $100,000 — about $2 million today.
But the house’s history, celebrity and location have caused its value to grow exponentially in the past five decades well above inflationary pricing.
Inside the Hilton home
With only two past owners in its 85-year history, the house’s facade is nearly identical to how it looked in the ’30s and ’40s, except that the tall front door with carved wood columns has been painted white and a pair of shutters on a window above the door have been removed, photos show.
Inside its wrought-iron gates, the two-story home is filled with immaculate moldings and wood paneling. The front door opens to a chandeliered central hall with floor-to-ceiling picture windows looking straight past a lattice-inspired patio through to the yard, pool and pool house.
Step down four steps to the right, and you’ll find the living room where LaChapelle took Paris’ picture. The room with vaulted ceilings and an ornate fireplace opens to a private garden and ornamental koi pond.
Attached in the southwest wing is a comfortable den with a fireplace and a dark wood-paneled office. The den opens to a covered terrace with a double-height circular roof supported by pairs of slender columns.
To the left of the entry, in the three-sectioned north wing, is the billiard room and the library, which also has a fireplace. Attached are eight additional rooms, likely bedrooms, that once served as bedrooms with sitting rooms for maids, according to “The legendary estates of Beverly Hills.”
The north wing has an eastern section facing the backyard with a dining room, commercial kitchen, butler’s pantry and breakfast room, which was a trademark of architect Williams for intimate family dining, which he also employed for Frank Sinatra and other stars.
The dining room has dark wood floors and floor-to-ceiling multi-pane bay windows. An opulent chandelier hangs over a table with seating for 12. The light-colored paneled wood walls provide refreshing relief in a style when many at the time would have chosen dark wood, which has largely fallen out of fashion.
A sweeping staircase on black and white tiles winds up to the second floor, where a central hall opens to a balcony overlooking the yard.
The second floor has two master bedrooms with bedrooms, bathrooms and garden views. One has a conic roof over the den and one has a fireplace. There are two additional bedrooms and an “expanded suite” on the second floor, according to the Pacific coast architecture database.
The home’s iconic pool has thousands of multi-colored hand-painted tiles imported from France in a sunburst with the 12 signs of the Zodiac, the listing video said of the art deco pool.
The pool house originally had a bar, grill and games room, according to the Pacific coast architecture database, though it’s not clear what is there now. The location of the sauna and gym, which are listed on Realtor.com, is unknown. They could be in the pool house or in what used to be the maid’s quarters.
There is a sunken tennis court behind the pool house. The 2.5-acre lot has two motor courts and a four-car garage, allowing parking for 15.
Rick Hilton (Paris’ father) and Barron Hilton (Paris’ brother) of Hilton & Hyland represented his grandfather, the seller, and Linda May of Hilton & Hyland represented the buyer. Rick Hilton did not reply to The Post’s request for comment.