Lisa Vanderpump is taking over the Strip, one Caesars property at a time

There are Bravolebrities, as the cable channel refers to the stars of its reality shows, and there is Lisa Vanderpump.

While two dozen of them showcased the beauty products and clothing they’d lent their names to during last month’s BravoCon at Caesars Forum — Larsa Pippen of “The Real Housewives of Miami” touted her Larsa Light, which promises better selfies and retails for $14.99 — the “Vanderpump Rules” namesake sat down to discuss putting her name on a hotel.

“When you look at the side of a building and you see Flamingo, you see Planet Hollywood, you see Caesars Palace, you see The Linq,” she said over a cup of tea, “now you’re going to see Vanderpump, personalized for me.”

When The Cromwell transitions to the Vanderpump Hotel early in 2026, the reality star’s touch and sense of style will be felt throughout.

“She is neck-deep into the design,” Sean McBurney, chief commercial officer and regional president at Caesars Entertainment, said in a separate interview. “And it’s not just the rooms. It’s the check-in experience. It’s the gaming floor. It’s the columns. It’s the lighting. It’s the signage.”

Vanderpump is involved in every aspect of the rebranding, including uniforms for the staff and the amenities in the rooms.

“She designs it herself,” McBurney said. “And I’m talking down to the rivets in the back of a chair.”

A star is born

Vanderpump had a minor acting career, appearing in episodes of “Silk Stalkings” and “Baywatch Nights” as well as music videos from the British synth-pop bands Naked Eyes and ABC. But she’s found the most success playing herself.

On Oct. 14, 2010, the London-born Vanderpump was introduced to Bravo viewers as part of the original cast of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.” She and her husband, Ken Todd, had run 37 restaurants in Europe before she’d filmed a scene.

In 2013, she added the spinoff “Vanderpump Rules,” set in her SUR Restaurant & Lounge in West Hollywood, California.

Vanderpump left “Housewives” following Season 9 in 2019, but she’s gone on to executive produce the Vanderpump Cinematic Universe, populating Bravo and Peacock with “Vanderpump Dogs,” “Vanderpump Rules: Jax & Brittany Take Kentucky” and “The Valley.” The latter follows “Vanderpump Rules” alums and will launch its own spinoff, “The Valley: Persian Style,” in January. “Vanderpump Villa,” meanwhile, airs on Hulu.

That proved to be a banner year for her, as 2019 also saw the opening of Vanderpump Cocktail Garden, which replaced David Furnish’s champagne lounge, Fizz, at Caesars Palace.

“It was a very expensive build,” McBurney said of Fizz. “There was an enormous amount of capital that was invested into it.”

Once Vanderpump Cocktail Garden was up and running in the exact same space, McBurney said, lines stretched back into the Forum Shops, and the spot did 10 times the business of Fizz. “We were like, ‘We’ve just found lightning in a bottle.’ ”

McBurney and his team wondered if there was enough demand for a second restaurant, or if they’d be cannibalizing the market. After Vanderpump á Paris opened at Paris Las Vegas in 2022, he said, “What we actually saw was the business at Caesars grew and continued to grow.”

Pinky’s by Vanderpump opened last December in the Flamingo. She and Todd also have Wolf by Vanderpump at Caesars Republic Lake Tahoe with a second location that opened this month at Caesars Republic Scottsdale.

The couple still has SUR, along with Tom Tom Restaurant & Bar about a thousand feet away. But at this point, is Vanderpump exclusive to Caesars?

“Well,” McBurney said, “if I had my way about it, the answer to that’s ‘yes.’ ”

‘I’m obsessed with her’

To truly understand the Vanderpump phenomenon, it helps to observe her fans.

“I’m obsessed with her. She’s the only person I wanted to meet,” Alicia Reis, 39, said while waiting in a long, winding line to have her photo taken with Vanderpump. “I feel like she’s so classy. She’s (on) a different level. No offense to the other ‘Housewives.’ I love them all. But she’s in a league of her own.”

Reis and a friend had come to BravoCon from Austin, Texas. They’d hired a glam squad to come to their hotel that morning to do their hair and makeup, at a cost of $300 each, just for that photo.

As Reis spoke, the words “elegant,” “smart,” “talented” and “beautiful” exploded in a jumble of praise from the women standing near her.

“I like her snarky, funny, sarcastic sense of humor,” Cathy John, 43, from Pennsylvania said while waiting for one of Vanderpump’s two panels that day. “I like how fancy she is. I love that she loves animals.”

John’s husband purchased a Cameo greeting from Vanderpump as an anniversary gift. At BravoCon, she was desperately trying to get a photo with Vanderpump, but reservations for that were long gone.

“She’s driven. Her love for animals. The way she dresses,” John’s friend Alison Sutton, 43, from Long Island said of what she admires about Vanderpump. “Just everything.”

They’d gotten to meet Heather Dubrow of “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” their distant second favorite Bravolebrity, but it just wasn’t the same.

At the end of that panel, friends Nancy and Sabrina, who’d flown in from Toronto, were first in line at the microphone for the Q&A session. One of them asked if they could get a selfie with Vanderpump. The other asked if she could have Vanderpump’s shoes.

They got the selfie.

‘She kind of ticks off every box’

If Andy Cohen is the unofficial mayor of Bravo Town, representing the channel at every turn, Vanderpump is its reigning queen.

Back when he was a development executive at the channel, Cohen picked her for that first season of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

So is Vanderpump the best casting decision in the history of Bravo?

“I would say she’s one of them. She kind of ticks off every box,” Cohen said on the BravoCon blue carpet. “I think she’s aspirational. She’s funny. She’s a successful businesswoman. And she’s beautiful.”

According to Vanderpump, what you see is what you get.

“They very much know me,” she said of viewers. “I think after doing something like 400 episodes of television, I would be a genius if I could conceal any part of me. The only part of me they haven’t seen is me naked, and they’re not going to see that anytime soon.”

Oddly, the one thing people rarely talk about when they meet her is TV.

Vanderpump’s son, Max, was adopted. Her brother, DJ Mark Vanderpump, died by suicide. She’s a fierce advocate for LGBTQ rights. Dogs are her great passion in life — Donut the Pomeranian accompanies her almost everywhere and often can be found in Todd’s arms during appearances — and she’s saved thousands of them through her Vanderpump Dog Foundation.

“I have all these very connective tissues on things that are emotionally driven,” Vanderpump said.

“People come up to me, ‘I adopted a dog. Or ‘My dog died.’ ‘My brother committed suicide.’ … People come up to me, ‘My son came out.’ ‘My son’s gay.’ ”

Loving Las Vegas

The chance for Las Vegans to have one of those encounters feels greater than ever now that Vanderpump and Todd have a home here, purchased last fall for a reported $5 million.

She assumes she’ll remain a Californian, despite Nevada’s tax benefits, and keep her beloved Villa Rosa estate in Beverly Hills as her primary residence.

“But I love my house here. I just love the way (that) Vegas is the playground of the world,” Vanderpump said. “Vegas has everything at its fingertips. It’s like tonight. ‘Who’s playing next to our restaurant in Caesars? Kelly Clarkson? I love Kelly. I’ve done her talk show so many times. Can I get tickets?’ ”

Vanderpump certainly prefers the business climate in Las Vegas.

“Nearly everybody I know in the restaurant business, actually, people that have many restaurants, have pulled out of California,” she said. “I think that’s such a shame.”

In addition to the general post-COVID struggles, Vanderpump noted the “ginormous” rents and other costs of doing business, including “the ridiculous litigious nature of California.”

“I was always an advocate of increasing the minimum wage in West Hollywood,” she said, “but not for tipped employees. I felt that was a mistake.”

Non-hotel employees in the city, including those who are tipped, must be paid at least $19.65 an hour, and that will increase to $20.25 on Jan. 1. The minimum wage is $12 an hour throughout Nevada.

What’s next?

Which brings us to the Vanderpump Hotel.

The building opened March 2, 1979, as Michael and Jackie Gaughan’s Barbary Coast.

In 2006, Boyd Gaming, which had acquired Coast Casinos from the Gaughans two years before, swapped the property for 24 acres Harrah’s Entertainment owned next to Boyd’s Stardust.

The following year, it was rebranded as Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall & Saloon, in honor of company founder William Harrah. During a renovation in 2013, the hotel was briefly known as the Gansevoort before it reopened in 2014 as The Cromwell.

“It was a very nice hotel,” Caesars’ McBurney said. “We put a lot of money into it when we did the full renovation many years ago. But, if we’re being critical, it didn’t have a super-strong identity. This just oozes personality.”

And that, he said, can serve as a response to critics who say the newer resorts on the Strip are too sterile and lack character.

Vanderpump described herself as relentless, a perfectionist and “a pain in the a-- when it comes to getting things done.”

McBurney, who’s been on the receiving end of her midnight FaceTime calls to discuss ideas, agreed with that assessment.

“She is delightful. She is fun. … But she is unrelenting on her designs. She is unrelenting on what she wants. She pushes us to make sure we’re giving her everything she possibly needs to be successful.”

Once Vanderpump and her design partner, Nick Alain, are finished with the 188-room boutique hotel, McBurney said, “this is going to be a very fun, energetic, beautiful property. It’s sophisticated, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s very bright. It feels very contemporary.”

“It’s very Lisa … but she’s smart in her design,” he added. “She realizes that, look, we have to sell these rooms over Super Bowl, we have to sell these rooms over March Madness, which may not be the core” of her devoted following.

McBurney likens the launch to the opening of the first Nobu Hotel inside Caesars Palace in 2013.

“That was, in my mind, a much bigger leap,” he said of the niche hotel. “It was (based on) a Japanese restaurant, and it’s proved to have broad appeal.”

There are 19 Nobu Hotels around the world with another 27 described on the corporate website as “coming soon.”

“I could certainly imagine this having a life like that,” McBurney said.

Contact Christopher Lawrence at clawrence@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4567.