Queen Von LA

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.”

“I wanted a sexy, womanly, grown-up kitchen,” says Von Teese, whose previous home featured a much-photographed all-pink ‘50s-inspired kitchen. “I fell in love with that AGA stove in that racing green, and just went from there. I brought in all my favorite greens—like a jade, a mint, a British racing green.” Original plans to go with brass fixtures gave way to rose-gold copper everything. The stove’s hood was inspired by metal awnings the star had seen driving around L.A. “I was literally stopping in front of people’s houses, taking pictures of their awnings, and saying, ‘Can you make me something like this?’”

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.”

“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.”