Les Paul’s Historic Home and Studio Has Been Demolished — and His Son Wants Answers
The New Jersey property where guitar and recording pioneer Les Paul lived for more than half a century, developed recording technology and maintained his private studio was sold for $990,000 in July. In August 2026, the house was demolished.
The demolition has since prompted an angry and emotional response from Les Paul’s son, Gene Paul, who says the family was given no advance warning that the building was going to be destroyed.
“I’m not an attorney. I’m a son,” Gene told Guitar Player. “And right now, I’m a heartbroken son.” Seeing the family home gutted, he added: “It made me sick.”
For Gene, the connection to Deerhaven was both personal and professional. He grew up around his father’s equipment and later became a recording engineer at Atlantic Records. Looking back on the unusual environment in which he was raised, he once recalled: “Yes, he had a studio in his house, and built his own guitar and his own eight-track, but I thought every dad did this.”
Les Paul moved to Mahwah in 1952 and remained there until his death in 2009.
By the time he bought the place, he was already one of America’s biggest recording stars and a serious technical innovator. His pioneering work with overdubbing, sound-on-sound recording, echo and other techniques had begun earlier, particularly in his Hollywood garage studio. Mahwah, however, became the setting for the next major phase of that work.
In 1953, Paul conceived an eight-track tape recorder and began working with Ampex to refine and manufacture the system. Four years later, Ampex delivered an operational eight-track recorder to him. The ability to record performances onto separate tracks dramatically expanded what musicians and engineers could do inside a studio and helped establish the working principles behind modern multitrack recording.
Several of Paul and Mary Ford’s classic recordings were made at the Mahwah home studio during that time, including “Meet Mister Callaghan,” “I’m Sitting on Top of the World,” “Lady of Spain” and, most significantly, their 1953 hit “Vaya Con Dios,” which spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart.
The pair also produced Les Paul & Mary Ford at Home, a series of approximately 170 five-minute television programs recorded at the property. Paul continued working on pickups, guitars, electronics and recording equipment there long after his days as a chart-topping recording star were over.
Thankfully, the complete historic studio was not sitting untouched inside the house when demolition began.
Major pieces of Paul’s recording system had already been removed and preserved. His Ampex eight-track machine, nicknamed “The Octopus,” and the custom console known as “The Monster” were painstakingly restored and are now installed at the Les Paul Recording Studio in Hollywood, where the equipment is once again operational.
But Gene Paul and the Les Paul Legacy Group say historically significant material still remained at Deerhaven. According to Guitar Player, people close to Paul made a last-minute effort to recover items including handwritten research notes and his workbenches. The group has also alleged that some material had suffered water and mold damage. However, those claims about the condition and contents of the house have not all been independently verified.
For Gene, the demolition is also part of a much wider disagreement over how his father’s estate and legacy have been handled since Les Paul’s death.
Les Paul established the Les Paul Foundation in 1995, during his lifetime, with the stated purpose of supporting music education, recording innovation and hearing-related causes. After his death in 2009, longtime manager Michael Braunstein served as executor of his estate and went on to become Executive Director of the Foundation.
When hundreds of his guitars, pieces of recording equipment and personal possessions were auctioned in 2012, nearly $5 million in proceeds went to the Foundation.
Braunstein remains Executive Director of the Les Paul Foundation in 2026, while the Foundation’s most recently available IRS filing lists trustees including Jeff Salmon and Arlene Palmer. None of Les Paul’s children is listed among its officers or trustees.
That context is important when considering Gene’s question about the sale of Deerhaven.
The roughly seven-acre property sold for $990,000 on July 22, 2026 and Gene has publicly asked what will happen to the proceeds. However, his concerns appear to be less about whether he or his siblings were legally entitled to the money and more about the fact that Paul’s family says it had little or no involvement in deciding the fate of a property so closely tied to their father’s personal and professional life.
Gene has publicly criticized the way his father’s legacy has been managed, saying family members have largely remained outside the decision-making process. The demolition of Deerhaven has brought that long-running frustration sharply back into public view.
He says the family was not consulted before a place central to both their lives and their father’s work disappeared, and believes his family — along with Paul’s friends and fans — are owed an explanation.
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