Paris Hilton’s New Gulfstream G450 Is a Pink Barbie House In the Sky

Step inside Sliv Air. No, it’s not a new private airline, but a fully customized Gulfstream G450 recently presented to celebrity Paris Hilton as a birthday gift from her entrepreneur husband Carter Reum. The aircraft’s distinct name is a variation of “sliving,” a portmanteau Hilton coined that represents a combination of slaying and living your best life.

Many of us remember Hilton’s rise in popularity from 2003 to 2007 during the reality series The Simple Life with Nicole Richie. Hilton’s notoriety continued to flourish in some movie roles, modeling, advocacy projects, and various business ventures. Today, she is one of the highest-paid celebrity disc jockeys in the world, earning as much as $1 million per night. In December, Peacock will air a reunion of the reality show called Paris & Nicole: The Encore.

The fully refurbished G450 reveals just how much of Hilton’s life and career were melded into a bespoke creation by Sarah Mespelt Larrañaga, a Marina Del Rey, Calif.-based aviation designer. But it took a year to get there. In 2024, Reum found a well-preserved G450 on the brokerage market, which would allow his wife to get into a business jet much faster than commissioning a brand-new aircraft. The G450 has a cruise speed of .74 Mach (575 mph), and a range of about 4,350 nautical miles, capable of nonstop flights from Los Angeles to New York, or Miami to London. Its 45-foot-long cabin, and a generous ceiling height of 6 feet, 2 inches, gave Larrañaga an ample blank canvas.

But the designer faced an aesthetic conundrum. The aircraft needed to be a showstopper that conveyed Hilton’s public persona while also retaining a practical interior for traveling with the couple’s young children. Larrañaga presented a range of ideas, from conservative to ostentatious, to the couple. One of her favorite quotes from Hilton is: “Life is too short to blend in.”

The celebrity certainly lived up to that maxim. “I thought they might want to dial [the interior] down a bit to something with blues and grays and maybe just a few hints of Paris,” says Larrañaga, noting that Hilton instead fell in love with the fully customized, over-the-top option on par with her brand. It’s bold, pink, and undeniably Hilton. And it involved a lot of work.

“A full-scale interior and exterior aircraft refurbishment extends beyond cosmetic upgrades,” says Larrañaga. “We took it down to bare bones, and other than the metal shells of the seat frames and, of course, the floorboards, etc., we built everything else new.” The year-long makeover required seven months of planning, design, and materials selection, and five months for completions at Springfield, IL-based Standard Aero.

The Hiltonian interior includes a headliner with pink hummingbirds, carpet with sparkles, a new galley and aft lavatory, newly four-passenger divans with fabric creating a mélange effect, a lighting system with seven shades of pink, and six executive seats with Aeristo leather inserts (called Sparkle Custom Quilt), pink piping, and embossed logos (“Paris” for her seat and “Sliv Air” for family and guests) on the headrests.

The tables are lined in Shagarrett Shell by Garrett Leathers. Mepra cutlery, Paris Hilton heart-shaped champagne flutes, Sliv Air custom china, crystal, and flatware all create a personal touch very different from most business jets. The full-service galley features gloss-white cabinetry, contemporary appliances, and a bespoke refrigerator to chill Hilton’s eye masks during flight. Prince Tokyo Gizmo Hilton, the celebrity’s teacup Chihuahua, even received his own matching dog bed.

Pink and white are present on the bulkheads and headliners, but well-traveled areas such as the carpets have darker, more somber grays, offset by sparkles. “White carpeting looks great until you spill the first glass of red wine,” notes Larrañaga, who has designed jets for private owners and corporate clients like WWE.

On this project, Larrañaga worked closely with more than two dozen aviation specialists on the colors and materials. Only three colors were used on the exterior—Metallic white, Metallic Pink and a bespoke pink that paint manufacturer PPG has since added to its catalogue as “Paris Pink”—to create a simple-but-unforgettable effect. The winglets display Hilton catch phrases, like “That’s hot” and “Loves it,” and “Sliv Air” is written on the G450’s undercarriage, so it can be seen from the ground as it’s flying overhead.

The G450’s most complicated additions are behind the bulkheads. The new Honeywell avionics in the reconfigured cockpit, latest Starlink satellite system, and an advanced cabin-management system (CMS) concerned Larrañaga much more than the rest of the interior. When presented with multiple options, Hilton and Reum went all-in on in-flight entertainment and upgraded Wi-Fi that allow passengers to control audio/video, lighting, and other cabin systems via touch screens at their seats.

“The CMS is really what’s running the whole ship—the lighting, sound, even flushing the toilets,” says Larrañaga. “We had to make sure every new system worked with the existing Gulfstream systems.” The G450 spent five months undergoing its transformation. The cabin-management system and in-flight entertainment worked so well, says Larrañaga, it’s like a “private 4K theater in the sky.”

Unlike other celebrities such as Taylor Swift or Elon Musk, who try to hide their private flights, this pink-and-white G450 will be one of the most recognizable jets in the sky. Back in L.A., when Hilton saw the completed jet, she was moved to tears. “Sarah just got the vision and elevated it to a whole new level of Sliving,” Hilton says.

For lovers of aircraft design, that’s hot.

Click here to see more images of Hilton’s new jet.