Dita’s Dreamy LA Home

It’s been five years since the world’s most famous burlesque star, style icon Dita Von Teese, purchased her Los Angeles home, and yet she still thinks of it as a work in progress. “I don’t like to finish everything,” she says. “I like having projects.”

TBDs withstanding, the star has definitely managed to transform the 3,200-square-foot four-bedroom Tudor Revival–style home to match her inimitable punk pinup aesthetic. “All the walls were painted white,” she says of moving in. “And I have a phobia of white walls in houses. I am a maximalist. My first order of business was going through room by room and adding color and excitement to the room.”

The living room is where Von Teese takes a lot of her meetings, so it was important that the room was both beautiful and functional. The blue couch is a reproduction from a favorite store in Dallas called Deco-Dence. The original was too small, and so the owners made a version at a larger, more modern scale. The Deco Chinese rug is a bargain find the star found on Etsy, and the working phonograph is a Rose Bowl Flea Market score. “I bought a ton of records too,” she says. “The top actually comes off, and you can even take it outside." The taxidermy is antique. “I don’t condone hunting or hanging trophies, but these are antiques. And when I see something cool, first I fumigate it, then I bring it home,” she adds.

An antiques and taxidermy obsessive, Von Teese holds the past—its sensibility and attention to detail—in reverence. She was adamantly opposed to bulldozing through with a conventional modern-things-up design approach. “I like feeling like I am living in this house in a very similar way to the way somebody did in the '20s or '30s,” says Von Teese. “It made a big difference to me when I was buying the house that someone lived here for so long and raised their children here. The owner even got married here.”

A view of the back façade of Dita Von Teese's Tudor Revival–style home in L.A. features a roomy pergola-covered terrace that sits off the dining room, perfect for alfresco meals. The house features another terrace off of the master suite. Steps lead to a dark-bottomed swimming pool that is tucked into a private and lush landscape.

“I bought this house [in part] because the kitchen wasn’t overly renovated. I like to keep things as historical as possible.” Still, the kitchen was…brown, and so she immediately started to make her mark there: “Brown is my least favorite color in the entire world.”