Actress and Playboy model Bridget Marquardt has become a first-time home buyer with the purchase of a contemporary Mediterranean in Sherman Oaks for $1,725,000. She had been traveling for her "Bridget's Sexiest Beaches" Travel Channel show while intermittently house hunting for about a year. "I had a big list of all the things I wanted," she said, and "I wasn't ready to settle." Her patience paid off. The new 5,922-square-foot home "literally had everything plus," she said. Among her priorities was enough room to store all the clothes for her work on the show "The Girls Next Door" and the parties she attended during her seven years in residence at the Playboy Mansion. She is making one of the bedrooms in the five-bedroom, 4 1/2 -bathroom house into a wardrobe. Other items on her must-have list: a fireplace in the master bedroom and a swimming pool to which she plans to add a water slide. But no doubt the most personalized touch she'll be making to the two-story home is the installation of a swing trapeze and a lyra, or aerial hoop, in the soaring main entry hall. "Trapeze is a great workout," said Marquardt, who trains at Hollywood Aerial Arts in Inglewood. "It got me in the best shape in my life." The equipment, she said, will be "old school circus -- vintage-style -- with velvet on the ropes and shiny silver balls on the ends." The apparatus can be tied off along the ceiling should she care to move it out of center stage. Marquardt will be sharing the home with her boyfriend, Nicholas Carpenter, who directed "The Telling" (2009), a horror film anthology, and has been a music video director. He has worked as a set production assistant on TV as well as "Thank You for Smoking" (2005). His father, Scott Carpenter, was one of the original Mercury astronauts. Read More here

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