Welcome to Paradise Palms, the Las Vegas Neighborhood Where Midcentury Preservation Is Priceless

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It had a dark, rustic kitchen that appeared to be the product of a ’70s renovation and heavy wood beams that felt more outdated than retro.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.