Liberace at Home: Inside the Larger-Than-Life Musician’s Maximalist Dream Houses

For Liberace, style was substance. Yes, the pianist was once the world’s highest-paid nightclub performer and had a unique musical talent. (He became famous for playing, in his own words, “classical music with the boring parts left out.”) But Liberace was perhaps most beloved for his sassy patter with the audience, over-the-top costumes, and unforgettable performance style—which often involved him being driven onto the stage in a Rolls-Royce.

The entertainer, who described himself both as “Mr. Showmanship” and “a one-man Disneyland” was born Wladziu Valentino Liberace to Polish and Italian immigrants in West Allis, Wisconsin. He grew up poor during the Depression and helped support his family by playing piano in saloons. Fleeing his parents’ acrimonious divorce, the narrow-minded neighbors who mocked him for practicing piano, and the humble homes of his childhood (his mother ran a grocery store out of one), Liberace went on to become Las Vegas headliner and a television star.

He bought homes in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs and decorated them in his own inimitable style. As Scott Thorson, who claimed to be Liberace’s lover, wrote in his memoir Behind the Candelabra: My Life with Liberace, “crocheted pillows were a strange contrast to the decorator sofas, inexpensive paintings clashed with walls covered by French silk moiré, blown-glass souvenirs cheapened priceless commodes.… Years later I would know that the theme was palatial kitsch.” In the press, Liberace carefully developed a narrative of his life as a bachelor and never publicly acknowledged his alleged homosexuality; the performer even successfully sued a British tabloid for libel when they hinted at his private life. But beyond the headlines, the entertainer’s homes were a refuge where he could live life on his own terms, surrounded by his own decadent design choices—mirrored walls, piano-shaped pools, and all.

In life and in decorating, he followed and often quoted the advice of his good friend Mae West: “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.” These 10 images capture just a taste of the maximalist fever dream that was Liberace’s home life.

Liberace seated at a Baldwin Concert Grand with a clear plastic lid.

By 1953, having hit it big on television with The Liberace Show, “Lee” (as friends called him) moved from his starter home in North Hollywood to a mansion he had built on Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, California. Working with an architect, “I contributed my own ideas all the time,” biographer Darden Asbury Pyron, author of Liberace: An American Boy, quotes him as saying. “I made little sketches of the things I wanted. I picked out everything, from hardware to furniture.” True to “Mr. Showmanship” form, Liberace leaned into his signature theme. There were piano-shaped planters, pianos etched into the bottoms of lamps, and miniature pianos on shelves punctuated by piano bookends—and of course, there was the $10,000 Baldwin Concert Grand with a clear plastic lid pictured in this 1954 photo.