Photo: Kristina Bumphrey/Getty Images
A recession may be on the horizon, and the stock market is tanking, but reality star Lisa Vanderpump’s hospitality empire is apparently booming. Vanderpump, the Bravo matriarch, announced on Wednesday that next year she’ll be opening the Vanderpump Hotel in Las Vegas, renovating and rebranding a boutique hotel off the strip called the Cromwell in her pink-bedazzled-fedora-wearing image. Similar to her mantra at her famed West Hollywood restaurant SUR, which stands for “Sexy, Unique Restaurant,” a press release reads that the hotel’s focus would be “sexy elegance and comfort.”
There are Real Housewives cruises and a Summer House Airbnb in Nashville. A Bravo hotel seems like a natural evolution for the channel’s extremely devoted fan base. Vanderpump’s collection of restaurants and bars in L.A. was already a kind of mini-Bravo Disneyland, where fans could run into the wait staff of Vanderpump Rules in person. The first BravoCon fan convention in 2019 at the Manhattan Center in New York offered a similar experience at an even grander scale, a fever dream in which fans consumed branded products like rosé-flavored Pepsi along with panels and photo ops with their favorite stars, like Madame Tussauds figures come to life. In 2022, it expanded to the Javits Center, then all the way to Vegas for 2023, where Vanderpump had already been building an outpost of her empire. She has three other steampunk-meets-Barbie-styled restaurants in the Caesars Palace casino and resort, with which she is also partnering on her new hotel.
The promotional video doesn’t show any specifics, just general Vegas razzle-dazzle, but just imagine running into Tom Schwartz by the ice machine. I, for one, take some solace in the fact that Lisa Vanderpump is bullish on the hospitality business, and bullish on elegance, comfort, and sexiness. I just hope she doesn’t need steel or aluminum anytime soon.