Inside Will Smith’s 2-Story, $2.5 Million Motorhome, The Heat

Being an actor means spending months away from the family and the family home, holed up in movie trailers and mingling with movie crew, producers and creatives. It also means having to live on the road, more or less, and that kind of lifestyle can get exhausting after some time. Or so actors keep telling us.

Enter Anderson Mobile Estates, an American RV company that caters only to the most discerning clients with very deep pockets, and aims to offer them a proper home. Anderson Mobile Estates is, these days, synonymous with custom builds, extravagant taste and the most lavish interiors, and it all started with a motorhome aptly named The Heat.

The Heat is Will Smith’s movie trailer, and the first high-profile delivery from the company. Initially, the Anderson family ran the Star Trax Celebrity Coaches, the family business they set up in 1987. In 1999, they sold the company and went on a sabbatical, sailing around the world. This would eventually inspire them to want to create the world’s most extraordinary landyachts.

Their first build was The Studio, which Smith saw and loved. He had it customized and it became The Heat, a monster, two-story, 22-wheel motorhome that can still put to shame actual mansions. It’s a massive RV that, back when it was first unveiled, was the epitome of elegance and luxury. Today, it feels more than just a bit dated, so adjectives like “sleek” and “modern” no longer apply. But it remains one of the most impressive motorhomes ever created, celebrity-owned or not.

At $2.5 million, it also ranks among the most expensive in the world.

As far as we can tell, Smith still owns The Heat. Much like a superyacht, when he’s not using it, it’s available for rent, with the going fee being a reported $9,000 per week. For this kind of money, you get to roll in a genuine house on wheels, which pops up into a proper mansion once parked.

As designer Mackenzie Anderson explains in the HGTV Celebrity Motor Homes segment below, four-slide-out motorhomes are not unheard of, but Anderson Mobile Estates was the first company to make the roof expand as well. Eight pistons push out the roof, raising it 42 inches (107 cm), to create the upstairs level, where a 30-person screening room with automatic shades and a 100-inch drop-down screen, to name just two of the amenities offered. The screening room also doubles as an office.

The downstairs offers a full kitchen with a dining room slash lounge, and a secondary lounge that serves as wardrobe for when Smith is on location. The first lounge includes a professional makeup station and, based on more recent photos of The Heat, a tiny office. The bathroom alone costs $25,000 and goes the full width of the trailer, including a sauna shower and separate dry toilet, with a glass door that goes opaque at the touch of a button.

Because this is no regular motorhome, all doors are automatic: the designer calls them Star Trek doors, and they also make a sound upon opening and closing. Back in the day (early 2000s), many thought Star Trek doors were “the future.”

In total, the 55-foot (16.7-meter) The Heat offers 1,200 square feet (111.5 square meters) of living space, and the kind of luxuries and amenities you’d normally find on a yacht, which was the goal all along. These include $200,000 granite countertops throughout, $125,000 in tech and gadgets (and a total of 14 TVs), and $30,000 in real leather on the couches and even the ceilings. Based on information made public, The Heat doesn’t have a proper bedroom.

After taking delivery of The Heat in the early 2000s, Will Smith has famously lived in it while filming for Ali, Men in Black III, and The Pursuit of Happyness. He is not the only A-list client of Anderson Mobile Estates, either: Shakira, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Hart, Brad Pitt, Charlie Sheen, Jim Carrey, Sharon Stone, Whitney Houston, Sylvester Stallone, Jamie Foxx and even POTUS Bill Clinton have owned or used one such mega-motorhome at some point.

As the saying goes, if you’ve got, flaunt it.