Architectural Digest Spotlights Vegas ‘Showgirl’ Homes
Posted on: May 8, 2026, 10:47h.
Last updated on: May 8, 2026, 11:05h.
- This week, Architectural Digest highlights three Las Vegas performers who have purchased and restored historic mid-century homes
- The residences were originally built for casino moguls and executives in Las Vegas’ golden age
- Performers Gypsy Wood, Carlotta Champagne, and Melissa Deadrich are portrayed as preserving “showgirl” aesthetics through maximalist interior design
Las Vegas has not had a true showgirl in a decade. The last topless feathered revue — Jubille! at Bally’s — folded in 2016. By every measurable standard, the job is extinct. And yet, in the most Vegas twist imaginable, Architectural Digest (AD) this week devoted this glossy spread to three modern performers showing off their homes as if the golden age never ended.
The women featured — Gypsy Wood, Carlotta Champagne, and Melissa Deadrich — are not showgirls in the Donn Arden sense. They are performers, models, wrestlers, and a vlogger who inherited the silhouette without ever stepping into Follies Bergère. But they did something the classic showgirls couldn’t: they purchased the kinds of homes once built for the city’s casino executives, moguls, and entertainers — the men who shaped midcentury Vegas.
“A new wave of financially independent female entertainers — the very women who might have once taken orders from the men in charge — are now snapping up those time-capsule residences and reimagining them with flamboyant decor,” AD reports.
Knock on Wood
Wood — star of the Spiegelworld show The Party at Superfrico inside The Cosmopolitan — anchors the piece. An Australian dancer whose act involves plate-spinning, sky-high wigs, and a furry merkin, she bought a 1954 ranch house for $320,000 dollars in 2022. The house, likely once owned by a casino manager or entertainment director, still had its original wallpaper, smoked mirrors, and a Rock-Ola jukebox.
Wood kept everything. She filled the home with salvaged casino drapes, Venetian rugs, estate sale treasures, and a dressing room worthy of Elizabeth Taylor. (She purchased her Rococo-style pink velvet bed from a security guard at Treasure Island.)
The house — which in the hands of a real-estate flipper probably would have been gutted into a white-box — even appeared onscreen in the 2024 film The Last Showgirl.
Champagne Dreams
YouTube fashion vlogger Carlotta Champagne is the curator of the group. A model, artist, and former Playboy.com Cyber Girl, she bought her six-bedroom Paradise Palms home in 2021 and immediately began restoring it to its 1980s casino mogul-glory.
Paradise Palms itself was developed by Irwin Molasky and Merv Adelson, the men who built half of midcentury Las Vegas. The neighborhood became a magnet for the Strip’s elite: Caesars executive Ash Resnick, Stardust executive Jerry Gordon, Riviera executive Jimmy Newman, and entertainers like Dean Martin and Johnny Carson.
These were the people commissioning rock walls, marble floors, and sunken cocktail lounges. Champagne inherited one of those houses, complete with a leaking pool, gas escaping from the heaters, and a foundation that was slowly dissolving. She rebuilt it piece by piece, leaning into a maximalist fantasy she calls Ho Chateau. Now her home is a museum of erotic, high-kitsch Vegas camp. There is a mermaid coffee table salvaged from the Madonna Inn, a clown orgy painting, erotic French needlepoint cushions, a heart-shaped bed, a “male chauvinist” room, and a wig wall backed with fabric from an unspecified old casino.
Lifestyles of the Deadrich
Melissa Deadrich — the professional wrestler who performs as “Cheerleader Melissa” — bought her Las Vegas residence, a tiki-infused Polynesian fever dream called the Lava House, during the height of postwar exotica in 1962. It sits in Beverly Green, the enclave once favored by casino owners and executives from the Sahara, Riviera, and Stardust.
Plumbing issues, collapsing fences, broken AC, a tree threatening the foundation — none of it deterred Deadrich. She leaned into the home’s tropical maximalism with lava-rock showers, wood-paneled TV rooms, tiki privacy walls, shag carpets, and carved totems that look like they wandered off the set of Blue Hawaii. Her house is pure showgirl — theatrical, moody, and drenched in Vegas nostalgia.
So why is Architectural Digest spotlighting showgirls who aren’t actual showgirls? Because the showgirl may be dead, but her aesthetic survived her. These women are not reviving the job. They are reviving the spectacle. They are preserving the velvet wallpapers, the mirrored ceilings, the lava rocks, the mermaid tables, the leopard carpets.
And though the homes they own never belonged to real showgirls, now they’re being kept alive by the women who inherited their spectacle.
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