Greystone Park is open every day of the year, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., free to walk and free to park, sixteen acres of terraced lawns and formal English gardens above Loma Vista Drive. The mansion inside those gates runs on a different clock entirely. Most weeks, the 46,000-square-foot Tudor Revival house that architect Gordon B. Kaufmann built for Ned Doheny Jr. in 1927 and 1928 stays locked to anyone who isn't there for a wedding, a private event, or a film crew. This fall, four limited programs are opening the mansion on separate schedules; two have already taken place, and two are still ahead of you.
A Park With Two Doors
The distinction matters because it's easy to visit Greystone often and never once see past the entry hall. The City of Beverly Hills bought the estate in 1965 specifically to stop it from being demolished and subdivided, turned it into a public park in 1971, and landed it on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. All of that history covers the grounds. The house itself, all 55 rooms of it, functions more like a rented event space that occasionally lets the public in on its own terms than like a museum with fixed hours.
The one recurring exception is a program called Inside the Mansion, which opens the ground floor and the recently restored theater on the first Saturday or Sunday of each month, January through November, at no charge. It's the baseline. Everything else layered on top of it this fall was a limited engagement.
Two Openings Already Came and Went
The first came on September 19, when the city's annual Great Outdoors at Greystone nature celebration filled the grounds from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., free and unticketed, with a poetry submission call built into the program and self-guided access to the same first floor and theater that Inside the Mansion opens monthly. It marks the anniversary of the estate becoming a dedicated public park.
The same week carried a second, larger opening. Gatsby Redux, a site-specific dance theater production staged by Mixed eMotion Theatrix under director and choreographer Janet Roston, returned to the terraced gardens on September 16, 17, and 19 at 6:30 p.m., presented in partnership with the Beverly Hills Community Services Department. The production doesn't seat an audience in one room. It moves people through the gardens and select interior spaces as dancers perform scenes drawn from F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, one location at a time. A 2025 Beverly Press report quoted Roston calling Greystone her favorite site for the piece and saying it was simply the perfect setting for the show.
What makes this year notable isn't that Gatsby Redux happened again. It's that the production has visited Greystone in 2022, 2024, 2025, and now 2026, skipping 2023 entirely. It isn't a fixture the way an annual festival is. It's a booking that Mixed eMotion Theatrix and the city choose to renew or not, year to year, which means the mansion's interior access isn't assembled on a museum's fixed calendar. It's assembled by whichever outside program happens to land a date.
Two More Are Still on the Calendar
Two openings from this stretch haven't happened yet. From October 28 through November 4, a fresh floral mannequin exhibition inspired by HBO's The Gilded Age will be installed throughout the mansion, giving visitors a reason to see rooms that Inside the Mansion's first-floor tour doesn't typically cover. Then, on Sunday, November 22, from 11 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Friends of Greystone runs its Best Kept Secret Tour, a self-guided walk through the full 55-room house for $20 per person, paired with historic photographs documenting what the home looked like in 1928 and again in 1945.
Here's how the four limited fall programs compare with the recurring Inside the Mansion program:
| Program | 2026 Dates | Cost | What It Opens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inside the Mansion | First Sat or Sun, monthly through November | Free | Ground floor and restored theater |
| The Great Outdoors at Greystone | September 19 (completed) | Free | Grounds, plus first floor and theater |
| Gatsby Redux | September 16, 17, 19 (completed) | Historically $25 to $30 | Terraced gardens and select interior rooms |
| Gilded Age Floral Exhibition | October 28 to November 4 | Ticketed | Full mansion interior |
| Best Kept Secret Tour | November 22 | $20 per person | All 55 rooms, self-guided |
The programs offer different kinds of access, and their prices vary. The city's own Community Services Department runs the dance production and the nature celebration. Friends of Greystone, a nonprofit support organization, runs the Best Kept Secret Tour. The floral exhibition is booked through the city's event calendar separately from both. Nothing about the sequence is coordinated ahead of time into a single fall program. It just happened to land that way this year.
What Actually Changes Room to Room
The house holds details that don't surface unless you're inside it. Five chimneys, each one designed and crafted by a different artist. A movie theater that has been restored recently enough that it's now specifically named as part of the Inside the Mansion tour. A bowling alley that appears in film history for hosting a scene from There Will Be Blood. A hidden bar built during Prohibition. None of these get equal billing across the different programs. A self-guided Best Kept Secret Tour ticket buys access to the full house and its historic photo displays. A Gatsby Redux ticket buys the gardens and a handful of staged interior rooms, timed to a live performance rather than a browsing pace. The free monthly Inside the Mansion visit covers the ground floor and the theater only, which is the version most consistent with a quick weekend stop.
The mansion cost more than $3.1 million to build in the late 1920s, a figure equivalent to roughly $58 million in 2025 dollars, and it remains the kind of structure that reads differently depending on whether you're walking it alone with a printed photo guide or following a costumed dance troupe through the same staircase Ned Doheny used to descend to breakfast. Both are real ways to see the same sixteen acres. Neither one is the default way, because there isn't one.
The grounds will keep their daily 10 to 6 schedule regardless of what's booked inside. Public access to the mansion follows the monthly Inside the Mansion program and other dates booked by organizers. For this particular stretch of fall, the floral exhibition closing November 4 and the Best Kept Secret Tour on November 22 are two additional limited-engagement chances to see past Greystone's front door.
If you're weighing when to time a visit, or you're curious what else in Beverly Hills operates on this kind of layered, multi-organizer access pattern, Simon Mashian is happy to walk through it with you.
