Seth Rogen shares his museum-worthy vintage ashtray collection

If your perception of Seth Rogen begins and ends with his scruffy stoner/schlubby Everyman persona, you might be surprised to find out that the actor, producer, comedian and cannabis-brand entrepreneur is also an ashtray aesthete of the highest caliber and owner of a massive, museum-worthy collection of seriously stylish ashtrays from days gone by.

Seth Rogen and some favorite ashtrays from his extensive collection.

Rogen’s collection was amassed over the last two and a half decades and is heavy on colorful Midcentury Modern ashtrays. He thinks his approximately 567 pieces might possibly be the world’s largest collection of vintage ashtrays. (The arbiter of such things — the Guinness Book of Records — doesn’t distinguish between vintage or nonvintage in recognizing an Australian man’s 1,560 pieces as the world’s largest ashtray collection.) But even without that superlative, it’s an impressive collection, comprised of pieces from the Golden Age of ashtrays, the period from the 1920s through the late 1970s during which exceptional craftsmanship was focused on what’s essentially a miniature fireproof trash can.

Although most of Rogen’s collection has been meticulously cataloged and placed in storage, a few dozen pieces, including lantern-like ceramic ashtrays designed to hang from tree branches and stackable mini-ashtray sets in a rainbow of colors, are on display at the Hollywood offices of Houseplant, the cannabis and housewares brand launched by Rogen and longtime friend Evan Goldberg in 2021. At those offices is where, a few years back, I first became aware of the massive cache of ash catchers.

And it’s at that cottage-style space, part showroom and part Midcentury Modern VIP party pad, with a turntable near the fireplace and Houseplant accouterments and ashtrays dotting every available surface, that Rogen met me on a recent summer afternoon to highlight a handful of his favorite pieces and talk about how to share the collection more widely with the world. (An interactive ashtray exhibition, anyone?)