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We Took a Tour of Prince’s Home Before Coronavirus Shut it Down

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Four years after Prince died at Paisley Park, VICE walked through the same halls with the man who helped him write his own story.

On April 21, 2020 — the fourth anniversary of Prince’s death — VICE News published a 6-minute, 40-second report titled “We Took a Tour of Prince’s Home Before Coronavirus Shut it Down.” Reporters Dexter Thomas and Nicholas Fraccaro had gotten inside Paisley Park, the 65,000-square-foot Chanhassen, Minnesota compound Prince built as both production studio and private sanctuary, in early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic forced the site to suspend public tours. Thomas made the walk with Dan Piepenbring, the writer who co-authored Prince’s posthumous 2019 memoir, “The Beautiful Ones.”

• Paisley Park opened as a permanent museum after Prince’s death on April 21, 2016, with general admission starting around $50.
• The complex enforces a strict no-recording policy — visitors must surrender phones and cameras at the door before entering.
• Dan Piepenbring, who worked directly with Prince during the final months of his life on “The Beautiful Ones,” guided Thomas through the recording studios, personal artifacts, awards, and Prince’s soundstage.

A Rare Walk Through a Guarded Fortress

Paisley Park was never built for outsiders. Prince designed the compound as a closed creative ecosystem — a place to record, rehearse, and disappear from the industry that had made him famous. Since it reopened as a museum in 2016, the estate has let fans in the door but kept a tight grip on what leaves with them: no photos, no video, nothing beyond memory. That policy made VICE’s access notable on its own, but pairing Thomas with Piepenbring gave the segment something a standard ticketed tour couldn’t — a guide who had actually sat across from Prince and taken notes.

Piepenbring’s presence mattered because he wasn’t a museum docent reciting placards. He’d spent time with Prince directly, working on the memoir project that became “The Beautiful Ones” after Prince’s death cut the collaboration short. That firsthand history let him speak to specifics — how Prince worked, what he cared about aesthetically, the personality behind the artifacts — rather than the generic biography most visitors get.

Inside the Studios and the Soundstage

The report moved through the areas that define Paisley Park as a working facility rather than a static shrine: the recording studios where Prince famously worked around the clock, the awards and personal artifacts preserved on-site, and the sprawling soundstage and performance spaces built for rehearsals and full productions. These are the rooms where Prince recorded and rehearsed for decades, and the tour treated them less as museum exhibits and more as a functioning creative machine that had simply gone quiet.

Every visitor still has to hand over their phone at the door — the same no-recording rule that governed Paisley Park while Prince was alive still governs it now.

That detail threads through the whole segment: Paisley Park’s rules didn’t relax after Prince died and the estate went public. The compound still operates on his terms. For readers who enjoy walkthroughs of extraordinary private residences, the same appetite that drew fans to Inside a $65,000,000 Beverly Hills Ultra Modern MEGA MANSION applies here — except Paisley Park’s value isn’t square footage, it’s the four decades of music made inside it.

A Virtual Visit During Lockdown

By the time VICE’s report went up on April 21, 2020, the pandemic had already closed Paisley Park to ticket holders, leaving fans who wanted to mark the anniversary in person with no way to get inside. The segment functioned as a stand-in: a filmed walkthrough for an audience stuck at home, delivered on the exact date fans would have otherwise been making the pilgrimage to Chanhassen. It’s the same instinct that’s driven interest in other celebrity-owned properties opened to cameras, like the tour through why Matthew Gray Gubler lives in a “haunted tree house” — people wanting to see how someone they admire actually lived, not just how they performed.

Piepenbring’s role gave the piece its edge over a typical museum tour video. He wasn’t narrating from a script handed out by the estate; he was recounting a working relationship with Prince that ended only because Prince died before the memoir was finished. That’s the detail that separates this report from a standard travel segment — it’s not just what Paisley Park looks like, it’s someone who was actually in the room with the man who built it.

Piepenbring’s book, “The Beautiful Ones,” had come out in 2019, built from the pages Prince had drafted before his death combined with Piepenbring’s own account of their collaboration. Walking those same halls with a camera crew a year later closed a loop of sorts — the co-author back in the space where the work started, describing it to an audience that, thanks to COVID-19, couldn’t buy a $50 ticket and see it themselves.