Cindy Funkhouser’s space celebrates her love of the odd and original

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011 | 2 a.m.

The last time we paid a professional visit to Cindy Funkhouser’s stylish pad was in 2003, four months after the antiques dealer started a little downtown arts festival called First Friday. Funkhouser ran the Casino Center and Colorado epicenter while facing cancer, heart surgery and a subsequent heart attack. Now that she has passed the First Friday torch onto new owners, she’s been able to spend more time on her antiques business and her nonprofit Whirlygig and, when possible, at home. Her apartment, in the heart of downtown, is a well-organized Las Vegas scrapbook of sorts.

Photo by Beverly Poppe
The Space

This 2,000-square-foot-apartment above the Funk House could double as a museum of the Las Vegas arts scene. Funkhouser has been in this 1958 building for 11 years, and her spacious three-bedroom home streams together like a series of galleries—art, vintage collectibles and random curiosities. Sculptures spill out of the living room, filled mostly with mid-mod furniture, and into a second-floor atrium. Her view is of the industrial neighborhood, backdropped by the Stratosphere. This is her dream. Funkhouser says she always wanted to own an older building, with her business downstairs and her apartment above.
Photo by Beverly Poppe
The Collections

Funkhouser’s orderly collection feels infinite. Designer lamps and a Bellevue Hospital coffee cup? Yes and yes. She’s collected since childhood; her first piece was a little plaster baby asleep on a pillow that rests in a cabinet amid European ceramics, Bakelite collectibles and the top from her seventh birthday cake. A suite of white paintings and works on paper in white frames includes a Miguel Rodriguez concept drawing of a heart sculpture, given to her after surgery.

“I kind of have this rule now,” Funkhouser says. “If I bring something home I have to take something downstairs. If nobody buys it, I’ll bring it back up.”
Photo by Beverly Poppe
The Kitchen

Funkhouser’s kitchen is throwback—gold-flecked composite floor tile, twin ovens built into the original paneled wall and an island overlooking the living room, which holds delicate glass flamingos.
Photo by Beverly Poppe
The Glass

“If I had to carry something out if the building was burning, it would be my glass, my Carl Hopp outsider art and my William Fahey drawings,” she says. “The headline would be ‘Woman dies in fire.’”
Photo by Beverly Poppe
The Outsider

Funkhouser’s 40 sculptures by found-object artist Hopp—include a roller coaster in the atrium—are mechanical, rusted and highly detailed. The pieces were rescued from the Hopps when the artist’s wife told him it was time to get rid of the collection. Her first Hopp piece was a guitar player in a little outfit holding the front part of a toy guitar, standing on door stop feet and smiling.
Photo by Beverly Poppe
Graphite Schizophrenia

The third “save in a fire” collection is a series of drawings by Fahey. The elaborate (and disturbingly twisted) montages of women line the walls of a room that also includes a 1940s Wurlitzer piano with a human skull on top.

Funkhouser says the drawings were given to (or traded for liquor with) an Oregon bartender, whose son sold them to a collector. She likes the creepiness and the glimpse into Fahey’s mind: “There isn’t a woman who’s anatomically correct below the waist. Who knows what was going on in his head? They’re so well done, but this guy was obviously crazy.”
Photo by Beverly Poppe
The Homage

Mostly, the home is an homage to the shows and the artists who’ve come and gone or lingered among the Las Vegas arts scene. Hanging salon-style in the rooms and hallways are works by Sam Davis, Casey Weldon, Dray, Jennifer Henry, Shan Michael Evans, Thomas Willis, Jerry Misko, Mark T. Zeilman, Ripper Jordan, Amy Sol, Venske & Spänle, Eun Young Choi, Kathie Olivas and Enrique Nevarez, to name a few. Among her favorites: Cristina Paulos, whose paintings of her trademark twins romp in paintings throughout the home. And Funkhouser’s still collecting.