RuPaul's Dramatic & Glamorous Beverly Hills Mansion
Hollywood Regency glamour built as a stage for the world's most famous drag queen
When you design a house for a drag queen you can go wild. Who else is going to let you hang twenty-six disco balls in the ballroom, some of them six feet round? RuPaul, that’s who. A friend of almost thirty years asked me to decorate his dream home, and it became one of my favourite projects to date.
A staircase glamorous enough to make Florenz Ziegfeld weep. Twenty-foot metal-framed windows announce the glamour behind the lacquered front doors, and inside are towering marble columns, inlaid stone floors and bold Neoclassical parquetry. The black and white floors that run through the house are Duchateau.
The ballroom rivals any Studio 54 moment you could imagine. Twenty-six disco balls hang there, some of them six feet round, above a wall of divas.
Velvets and silks, leopard and Greek key, chinoiserie, fringes and tassels, and lashings of Hermès orange. Careful research went into Hollywood Regency and its classical revival in the 1930s and 1940s.
Behind the old Hollywood surface it works as office, archive and centre stage, with a glam room and a podcasting room built in.
“Martyn Lawrence Bullard carries the torch of the divine, the sublime, and the beautiful. I trust his eye implicitly.”
RuPaul
The primary bedroom lives out every one of Dorothy Draper’s directives.
The powder room is wrapped in a custom de Gournay paper of gilded cameos, each one a silhouette of the drag doyenne in a different wig.
The house began with seven bedrooms. It became a one bedroom house with five thousand square feet of closets, holding three thousand ball gowns. This is not only the house of the most famous drag queen. It is the House of Drag. Martyn on designing the drag closet.
Two enormous closets, one for male attire and the other for drag, hold the suits, gowns, hats and wigs of a forty year career, alongside a queen’s ransom in sparkly bijoux. The chevron floor is Duchateau.
The ultimate in custom design, and the perfect trophy for a man who has spent his life breaking boundaries. Hear Martyn on designing for RuPaul.
Outside, a domed gazebo looks over the pool, the terrace planted to carry the same neoclassical line as the rooms inside.
The house was published in Architectural Digest in June 2023.
Photography by Douglas Friedman for Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
RuPaul opens the doors for Open Door, the Architectural Digest series now streaming on Netflix.
Star Style
This project appears in Star Style by Martyn Lawrence Bullard, his collection of the interiors he has created for the people who shape modern taste. Signed copies are available here.
