Circus folk bend over backward for Halloween
Las Vegas acrobats Ross Gibson and Benoit Beaufils look forward to Halloween like schoolchildren await summer vacation, and their Spring Valley house looks like a Halloween pop-up store.
The two performers met while working in Cirque du Soleil productions. Gibson plays Red Bird in “Mystere” at Treasure Island, and Beaufils was in the original cast of “O” at the Bellagio before moving into a role in “Le Reve” at The Wynn.
Both are athletes in different sports who represented their countries at high international levels at world and European events. More recently, Beaufils represented his native France in the 2015 World Aquatics Championships. Gibson, from Great Britain, won second place in the 2002 World Cup Final in tumbling and appeared on the Oct. 3 edition of “Dancing with the Stars” as Red Bird.
The pair have been together since 2004 and married for a year, and they are the parents of a 2-year old daughter whom they clearly adore. They own a two-story bungalow on a cul-de-sac off Spring Mountain Road that they bought in 2005 for $404,000.
The couple’s annual Halloween festivities are legendary. According to Beaufils, “our Halloween party has become quite notorious.”
Some of their decorations date back to Beaufils’ first party 16 years ago. Guests will be imbibing punch from bowls loaded with dry ice and a glow stick in the bottom to resemble a smoking witch’s caldron.
The spookiness begins at the sidewalk, where the front lawn is dotted with tombstones and their daughter’s toy vehicle is covered in cobwebs. A blinking sign reading “Bates Motel” beckons visitors through a covered archway on the porch and into the four-bedroom, three-bath home.
Above the entry, at the clap of a hand a ghost figure slowly traverses the distance from one side of the staircase to the living room via a tightrope, like an elderly, minimalist Cirque performer.
The thematic decor continues throughout the house: dangling body parts suspended from the dining room ceiling. The powder room has been transformed into a bath of horrors, with knives, saws and a severed arm suspended from the ceiling. As an added touch, a severed head sits countertop next to the black vessel sink, and fake blood drips from the mirror.
Like many parents with small children and a typically sized house, they have converted the living room.
“It used to be a living room. Now it’s a toy room,” said Beaufils sheepishly.
It’s hard to imagine what the house looks like without the heavy holiday influence, but clearly, paint is the medium most used to express moods. When they moved in, “there was not a lick of paint on any of the walls. It was white, white, white all over,” Gibson said. “Now there is not a white wall to be seen.”
In fact, Beaufils reports that there are over 32 different colors on the walls of the 2,200 square feet home, more flavors than Baskin-Robbins could invent in its heyday.
From the entry, the walls range in hues from purple to dark blue.
“The walls actually fade from one side of the room to another,” Gibson said. It is a technique they used in the backyard too, painting the cement block walls enclosing the yard, starting lighter on the east side and getting darker on the opposite side. “We’re very into blending effects,” Gibson said, “probably from doing Cirque du Soleil makeup 10 times a week.”
More bold paint choices are used in the family room, featuring a blue-and-yellow circus-stripe design.
“The Cirque du Soleil big top colors are blue and yellow, and it’s our salute to that,” Gibson said
They transformed typical oak kitchen cabinets and an island with a bright royal-blue-and-white combination paint job, installed a blue quartz countertop with specks of silver and added glass inserts to some of the cabinet doors.
The original patio slider door was recently replaced with modern French doors mixing different-sized clear and opaque glass pieces, like a colorless Mondrian painting.
The backyard is set up for entertaining, with a canopy, multiple tables, pool and waterfall and a jacuzzi tucked into a corner. They entertain a lot.
“Both of us have been in town long enough that we’ve made a lot of friends. We really enjoy having dinner parties. I do a pretty mean beef bourguignon, anything French,” Beaufils said.
They are proud of daughter Siella, who was conceived through an egg donation and the surrogacy effort of a close friend. Whether there will be more children, said Beaufils, “we will leave it up to fate.” In the meantime, their daughter is the object of their joint affection.
Siella’s room is a darling, childlike retreat fit for a princess. Her fathers lovingly painted it bright blue, with rainbows and many happy-looking Care Bears perched on puffy clouds. Two blue bears have the flag of Britain and a Gallic rooster and are connected to a smaller pink bear with stars above her head.
“It’s the room we’re most proud of,” Gibson said. “Ben was crazy about Care Bears when he was younger, and it was a bit of a gay iconic cartoon from the 1980s as well. They seem to live on clouds and slide down rainbows.”
The upstairs floor includes three bedrooms and a loft/office area, which Beaufils uses to paint. They installed slate tile flooring downstairs and bamboo floors with tiny silver tile accents upstairs.
Each room has an original paint design implemented by the couple. The guest bedroom is decorated in an animal motif, with a white claw print drawn on the bathroom’s black wall.
Their master suite has dark blue walls with a subtle glitter accents that become visible in certain light. They added a lot of tile details in the master bath, including small silver glass tile on the floor, and installed a black granite countertop with dual marine-blue rectangular vessel sinks.
They plan to stay put for the foreseeable future. However, they own two other houses within a mile of their current digs. One is the townhouse Gibson bought in 2002. The other is a larger house with a bigger yard bought in 2014.
“I knew we had friends who said they would move in if I bought it, so I didn’t have to worry about finding tenants,” Gibson said. When the time comes for expansion — meaning when Siella needs a bigger room — they plan to move there.
You might think a man who makes his living by dressing up in a red bird costume nightly would forgo the hardship of coming up with a Halloween costume, but you’d be wrong. Gibson’s costumes convey a dead-celebrity theme. He’s channeled Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger and Amy Winehouse. This year he’s going as David Bowie.
Beaufils has come as King Tut, an Avatar or the devil, using lavish body paint.
“We try to pull out all the stops,” he said. “This year we (some “Le Reve” cast mates) are all going as the French national team of dead athletes. Year after year, the costumes become quite elaborate.”
The pair, who are in their mid-thirties, like the neighborhood, which has a school very close by.
“It’s just about five minutes from every restaurant you could want to go to,” Beaufils said.
Lilly’s Thai and Vietnamese restaurant and the Summerlin bistro Marche Bacchus are two of their favorites.
“I think a lot of people choose where to live based on their work, and this seemed to be an area of town where a lot of people from Cirque were living,” Gibson said of their choice of neighborhood.
Gibson is also part owner, talent director and corporate accounts manager for Skin City Body Painting, a successful business with a storefront in the arts district.
They are the artistic directors for Circus Couture, an annual show to raise money for the Children’s Specialty Center of Nevada and the St. Baldrick’s Foundation, earmarked to fight pediatric cancer. This year’s show on Oct. 7 raised $350,000. Gibson said.
“Every year we raise more and more money,” Beaufils said. “Hopefully by our 10th year, we will be close to $2 million.”
