Inside Benny Blanco’s Fun-Filled L.A. Home ｜ Open Door ｜ Architectural Digest

Everyone always tries to act so cool when I'm so excited you're here. Hi AD, I've been waiting to do this forever. Come inside, my name's Benny Blanco. I don't know what else to say, bye. Not bye, hello. We are in, I guess this is called like a living room. I don't know, I call this a listening room. I love this room, because you kind of just melt into this couch. We made this couch. You can actually just fall back into this thing and fully submerge yourself and sink into the moment. You can fit like comfortably 15 people on this couch in various positions and in this position. And these speakers are these really old speakers that they had in a club called The Loft in like the 70s. And my friends got them for me as a gift. I play music really loud in here and I like to just melt away at the beginning and end of the day. I had a dream and I dreamt of this like big onyx box that I was walking towards that was like illuminated. I remember asking a friend who like fabricates a lot of this stuff for me. I was like, hey, can this be made? And apparently it can be made and it was made. And my ideal time is when it's raining. I have this little globe on and I have like a beautiful record on and copious amounts of marijuana. I'm so embarrassed to hear my own music. I also have another thing where the second I write something I actually can never play it again. I kind of just sit there and make it all happen on the spot when nobody's around. So no, I won't play. To me, this room has like so many powerful pieces of art in it. This one is Picasso and then that one's Martin Wong. I just feel like there's so much energy in this room. Oh my God, I sound like one of those people. Oh my God, that's crazy. I'm not one of those people. I'm not like, there's not like a crystal up my butt right now. I really do believe in like energy of like artwork and music and places. And I don't know, it makes me feel good when I'm in this room and I can kind of just like forget about the outside world for a second and then be flooded with anxiety the second I leave this room. But for now, wee! All right guys, we're in my dining room. I felt like I wanted to be like an adult in here. I wanted to be like regal. I wanted there to be like gold and it to be opulent. The truth of the matter is nobody ever goes in this room. Ever. The only time I ever go in is to grab bottles and bring them out. You know when you're a kid and like you go to your grandma's house and she has like the couch with like the laminate over it. That's what this room is. I've never go in this room. You got to check this one thing out. This is amazing. So my friend made this sculpture and everyone thinks it's real. It looks like it's just a bag of money, but it's actually made of wood. This is a chair my friend made out of bread and you can sit in it. I'm scared to sit in it, but you can sit in it. So this is by a guy named George Kondo. The painting's actually called The Musician. I kind of think it looks like me. I just like having art all over the house because I don't know what emotion the person had when they were making it, but I see certain things when I walk past it and it might inspire me and I might look at it differently another day and be like, holy ----, like I never noticed that one like stroke there or like that imperfection right there. I don't know. It makes me happy. I really care about the whole bar setup. I'm the type of person, people come over, I want to entertain. My girlfriend actually only drinks one drink, no matter what. It's just vodka, ginger beer, and lime. Now I have like different like Amaros. This one's insane. This one tastes like chocolate. This is, a man makes this in LA. You want a sip? It tastes really good. I'm the type of person where when a friend comes over to my house and they're like, oh, I really love this one Amaro. The next time they come, I try to make sure that there's like a bottle ice cold waiting for them. And honestly, I either want to be like a gentleman or be like I'm in a frat house and be taking like jello shots out of someone's stomach. There's one small thing about this room. The second you sit on this couch, it is impossible to get up. There's a lot of people with children who bring their children to the house, nieces and nephews. And we have a lot of play dates and I like a stuffed animal. So everyone does. Everyone likes a stuffy. I hate when you go into someone with like a nice house and it like doesn't feel lived in. I remember having the thought when I first got this house where I was just like, I want every room to be a spot where it's someone's favorite room. I wanted it to be so comfy. So if something gets spilled on or lost, it doesn't matter to me. I just want people to be able to walk in and feel at peace and feel like they can be their youngest self here and just like let loose. I got this whole wall of like tchotchkes that was basically designed for a child to grab something and throw it against the wall and break it into a million pieces and then me be disappointed in them. Oh my God, wait. You know what's one of my favorite things? Okay. This one. You know who this is? It's Junior Soprano. My friend made this out of clay. It looks like it's gonna be like wet, but it's not. This thing's like six years old, but I love this. This is one of my favorite things in here. My friend Will made this. Will Child. Good night, Uncle Junior. This is my kitchen, guys. This is where it all goes down. Honestly, this is the room we spend the most amount of time in. I'm cooking. There's 50 people in here. Sometimes people sit and we eat on top of this thing while people are over here. I find that cooking and sharing these experiences with friends. Oh, look at this. Little place right here. I actually have a cookbook coming out. This book is about like really throwing like the best dinner party and bringing all your friends together. And I like to bring people from all walks of life. There might be like a 75-year-old man sitting next to a young man who's just taken like toad venom for the first time. And he's like trying to find himself this evening next to like my mom wearing like a bedazzled shirt that says like Bada Bing on it or something. And then like SZA's like singing a song in the other room. And I find like just bringing all different people together to have an amazing time. With food, food is like the best lubricant to like talk to someone. And then my friend Jonas Wood, his children made these plates of meat. They look insane. I look insane. I look so crazy. These actually kind of look exactly like me. I have this thing that, I mean, if this drops, it could sever your arm in half. I kind of have like a grocery store down here. I got everything down here. You guys probably shouldn't come down. See, you guys can't fit in here. It's amazing. There's all sorts of stuff you want. One time, one of my friends tumbled down this and was on the injured reserve list for like three to six weeks. Come down at your own discretion. This is my room. Usually this room is all like white and cream based. If you look around, there's no paintings in this like main part of the room because I need all distractions away when I'm sleeping. Don't most people say like this is where the magic happens and stuff? That's stupid, AD. That's what they say on Cribs. No one says that on AD, right? AD's classy. We would never talk about magic happening in here. This is one of my little favorite benches. You know, sometimes I just sit here and like, I might like kick my feet up. And now look, look at me. I'm underneath this chandelier. This feels like an important time in history right now. Just, just sitting here, me and you. We're in the room. Something could happen. It wouldn't be magic. All right, guys, we're in my closet. Now, a lot of you might not know this, but depending on what I'm wearing, they actually change the color of the carpet and all of the cabinets every day. So I happen to be wearing pink today. So we went with the pink room. I honestly spend so much time in here. People come in here and we just, we kind of just like, we'll drink and hang out because it's the softest carpet. Put your feet up. You feel it? Yeah, it's a soft carpet. My stylist happens to be my friend since I was 13 years old. So her name's Chloe. She actually made this entire thing I'm wearing right now. And out of like old bed sheets from France. Look, I'm not afraid to wear a heel. This is a beautiful heel. Like, I want to be dainty sometimes. And I could use the extra inches. I'm very small. I like these. Look at these. Ooh, are you kidding me? Nice little, I almost don't want to touch them. You could lick the bottom. I love this room. It's also one of my favorite rooms in the house. This shower is actually a full steam shower. It's so big. My friend Dave, we, he's probably gonna kill me for this, but anytime he comes over and we're like, we have to go to something together and we're in a hurry. We just shower together because there's two separate showers. You can mind your Ps and Qs in there. You could turn on a steam. It's warm. Who doesn't want to talk when they're in the shower? You want a friend next to you. You want to be able to talk and have fun. We're outside. I feel like I've said this a hundred times. I think I like my house because most of the areas are my favorite areas. This is one of my favorite areas. I stay in this pool for minimum six hours at a time on the weekend. You know, when you went into a baby pool where like it was just filled with piss, that's exactly the temperature I like to keep this at. We always have parties. We're barbecuing, we're grilling. We're constantly in a flow of like pool, jacuzzi, sauna, cold plunge if you're not scared. I'm scared a lot. Everybody's all into the cold plunge now. You're not a professional athlete. Like getting in a cold plunge for like six minutes a day, like isn't going to help you write like 12 emails faster. Like relax. It's freezing. Nobody likes it. I get in every once in a while if I'm really hung over. Over there, that's like my personal oasis. That's where I like to have all my meals. Even if there's not enough seats and we have like 15 people, we're all crowded around there. We're eating. My favorite place though, besides that to eat is I usually feed everyone while they're in the pool and everyone like lines up on this area. But we're trying to be a little bit civilized. We go over there. This is where it goes down, guys. We have a pizza oven. We love making pizza. We love doing like Middle Eastern nights where we're making like pitas and also like Indian nights with naan and everyone will gather around here and we'll all put the pizzas in together, take them out. Honestly, it's just different places in my house for people to gather around and eat. Isn't that what life's all about? Basically a few years ago, my friend Scott and I started putting together a garden. I wanted to eat like what I grew. And in the time that we did that, we're always giving back and finding ways to do cool things with interesting charities. And my friend Maggie Baird has a charity called Support and Feed. We linked up and we basically deliver all the vegetables from my gardens to different food deserts in the LA area. We do it every single week and we get to feed people who are less fortunate and don't have access to like incredible, healthy, fresh vegetables. We're out in my guest house that I turned into a movie theater. I did this with my friend, Keef, and this is, oh, it's home. It's the best. This room, we watch movies in here. It's a black hole. One might stay here for two to seven business days. Everything's made out of velvet. It feels like you're in like a 70s porno. I love it. And then when I was a little kid, I always wanted a candy room. And now I got one. Now we have every type of candy you could ever think of. We got the M&Ms, we got the Reese's, we got the peanut butter M&Ms, we got the Skittles. Wait, I think they took Skittles away because they like kill you or something. It kinda, it makes me like them even more. Oh my God. We got so many candies from different countries over here. You know, I collect these. This one's Blowfish flavor. This ping pong table, me and my brother have had a feud over ping pong for 30 years. Unfortunately, I've never beaten him in my entire life. It doesn't even mean that he's necessarily better than me. He's just in my head. He owns my head, rent free. And I can't get out of it. And we've had near fistfights over ping pong. All right, AD, who's ready to play some ping pong? AD, thank you guys for coming over. I know I'm supposed to kick you out, but I actually don't have anything to do right now. So I don't, you probably do. I love you guys. Goodbye.