Cruise through the Las Vegas neighborhood of Paradise Palms on the first Saturday of any given month and you’ll find residents gathered for a “social” at one of their houses. They could be watching a live performance of synchronized swimmers, dressed up for an impromptu retro mock prom, or enjoying a raucous night of drinking and unwinding as a community.

The 1960s neighborhood was Las Vegas’s first master-planned community. Developers Irwin Molasky and Merv Adelson sought out Dan Palmer and William Krisel, the architectural duo best known for their beloved tract homes in Palm Springs; they designed about 400 of the approximately 1,000 homes that stand in the Paradise Palms area today. Local architect Hugh E. Taylor designed some in that period too, while other architects joined the mix later. Celebrities like Buddy Hackett, Dean Martin, and Johnny Carson all reportedly owned property there back then, but nowadays it’s a haven for midcentury-modern obsessives—many of whom care deeply about maintaining the original look and feel of the houses, even if it means spending exorbitantly, putting in loads of elbow grease, chasing down the period appropriate details, and reversing bland flips.

Take Leslie Homan, a makeup artist and small business owner who was living in California when she discovered Paradise Palms by chance in 2016 while looking at Realtor.com. She’d always appreciated midcentury-modern design, so following a period of success in her career, she decided to invest in a house there: a 1962 build by Taylor. It had a dark, rustic kitchen that appeared to be the product of a ’70s renovation and heavy wood beams that felt more outdated than retro. She pulled out the dark kitchen and painted the walls bright blue, swapped in an orange front door, and picked out delightfully kitschy furnishings in coordinating colors. The renovation cost her $100,000. Eighteen months after buying that home, she fell for a nearby custom 1964 four bedroom with a suspended kitchen island and Jetsons-esque appliances in the kitchen and bathrooms. “I fell in love with the breeze block, the roofline, just kind of everything about it,” she says. “It had so much potential.”

She secured the second home by writing a letter to the seller emphasizing that she intended to keep as much that was original to the house as possible. Nearing 10 years in that house (she rents out the first property), she’s stuck to her word, with the biggest project being a $98,000 overhaul of the backyard, which was just a patch of dirt by the time she bought it. She aimed to have the new design feel midcentury modern, adding palm trees and a geometric-pattern wrought iron fence. Otherwise, she’s spent $5,200 on replacing the old carpeting in the entire house, $9,000 on custom windows, and $4,500 on repainting the interior and exterior in a dusty pink hue that feels completely in line with the ’60s aesthetic.

Leslie’s neighbors Carl Ripaldi and Al Sanchez owned in Palm Springs prior to setting their sights on Paradise Palms as an ideal place to retire, citing the low cost of living. They bought two homes in Paradise Palms in 2012, the second being a Palmer and Krisel that they’ve now retired in, while they have since sold the other. “One of the things that I liked about it was that it was very, very much intact,” Carl says about the 1964 house they now live in. “We were able to preserve so many of the features that the house had.”

“These houses are money pits, but look, we wouldn’t have it any other way.”
—Bill Kennedy, resident

Still, there was work to be done. The couple pulled up all the carpeted flooring and replaced it with black, gray, and yellow tiling, inspired by reference images of midcentury-modern spaces from archival design magazines. This required specialty labor and cost $3,500. The bathrooms were no longer period appropriate, so they redid both at a cost of $6,000 apiece, adding terrazzo tile flooring and paying close attention to the hardware to ensure it also felt vintage. (Carl notes that this would cost far more now than when the work was done in 2012.) They spent an additional $20,000 on replacing the windows and another $20,000 on renovating the kitchen, choosing details that feel in line with the home’s period, like the mosaic backsplash by Modwalls and colorful overhead lighting. Al, an avid midcentury furniture collector, filled the home with a not inexpensive assortment of authentic finds, including a handful of George Nelson designs, like an early Marshmallow sofa, a chaise longue, and a Kangaroo chair, which together cost $19,500. “They’re like art pieces,” he says.

The area’s importance to Vegas lore was recognized in 2017 when it became the first official historic district in unincorporated Clark County. For Bill Kennedy, who lives just around the corner from Carl and Al, fixing up his Paradise Palms home is a way of connecting with that architectural heritage. When he moved to Vegas two decades ago, he missed the sense of history that he grew up with in Albany, New York, where he’d drive around with his father to look at historical buildings. He started an Instagram account, @ModernVegas, to spotlight architectural finds in the area, and through that he learned more about the Paradise Palms neighborhood. One day he parked in front of a house he found particularly remarkable and snapped a photo. Within six months, he and his wife, Meredith, had bought it, becoming first-time owners. “I’ve always thought that there was almost like a calling to this house,” Bill says.

Bill and Meredith used a photograph of the 1961 Palmer and Krisel home’s split-level exterior taken by no less than Julius Shulman as a barometer of the home’s restoration. Because it had been flipped sloppily before the couple moved in, Bill says, they’ve poured thousands of dollars into structural issues. He’s passionate about making the facade look exactly as it did in the Shulman photo. They spent $10,000 replacing the front door with a set of double doors and $7,500 to repaint the house and maintain the exterior wood elements. Finding the proper glass for the clerestory windows to replicate the original hammer glass was one of the biggest projects. Bill eventually found Milgard’s Aquatex finish—often used for shower doors—to achieve the desired effect, then worked with a contractor to chase down custom windows made with the material. “I want people to stand outside on the street and look up and have that photo and say, ‘This is the house,’” Bill says. (Now that the neighborhood is historically protected, residents must get any street-facing exterior modifications approved to ensure architectural integrity.)

Palmer and Krisel home Derek and Crystal Santiago live in with their daughter, Giada, and his mother, Rachel, Derek has gone on many a long-haul drive to secure mid-20th-century appliances. He traveled to Bullhead City, Arizona, some 101 miles away from Paradise Palms, to buy a vintage Chambers stove for $130. “I love design, and craftsmanship meant so much in those olden days,” Derek says." layout="" credit="Add credit" photoUserId=""/>

Derek Santiago is similarly passionate about the history of the neighborhood. He feels particularly moved by his vision of the midcentury era as a period when regular working people had easier access to beauty. “It’s something we may never see again for a long time, where you had the smartest minds doing a lot with a little and making it beautiful for the masses,” he says. As a father and a working artist, illustrator, and painter, Derek doesn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to put toward his 1963 Palmer and Krisel, but he’s a dedicated DIYer. He completely redid the paneling in his daughter’s room, where the seams of the butterfly roof merge. That project cost him around $1,500. In his kitchen, which flaunts vintage appliances he acquired for cheap by traveling to wherever he could find them, he also added a new ventilation system: “I had to become an electrician, a roofer, a carpenter, and a drywaller.”

Tanya Killeen and Michael Michaels’s 1970 custom-built home is one of the latecomers to the area. Where the Palmer and Krisel models are full-on atomic age, Tanya and Michael’s home is definitively ’70s. In their living room, which has a delightfully imposing stone fireplace that extends into the backyard, they laid new carpeting, which cost $6,500. “We went as sort-of high pile as we could get without it being a true shag,” Tanya says. Their guiding light has been remembering their childhoods during that decade—Tanya recalls the basements she spent her youth playing in. The pair chose their $6,000 extra-large sofa because it reminded Mike of the one his parents had when he was growing up.

“There are more of us who are invested in keeping the charm of the neighborhood rather than those who are coming in and just flipping for a profit.”
—Tanya Killeen, resident

A private Facebook group allows residents to keep in contact and exchange recommendations when dealing with maintenance headaches. “I’ll put a message out there and say, ‘Hey, anybody have a painter? Anybody have a plumber?’ And I’ll get referrals that way that have been tried and tested by other neighbors,” says Leslie.

Regardless of budget, or the scale of the renovation, the communal excitement seems to be a boon for everyone in the neighborhood. “I still drive around and look at houses and admire what people are doing,” Bill says. The residents’ monthly parties keep that energy alive, just as their renovations maintain the neighborhood’s aesthetic spirit. At socials, Tanya says, “you’ll pick something out and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to replicate that,’” adding: “I’ve taken inspiration from a lot of my neighbors.”

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