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Wynn has stated that the major shift with this new resort is the concept of designing from the "inside out". In contrast to his previous hotels Bellagio and The Mirage, there is no Las Vegas Strip attraction to draw in the gawkers. Instead, visitors must venture inside to see what the hotel is all about. Wynn has said that "there is no franchise in a casual observer, there is a franchise in a guest."
The site was assembled by buying the Desert Inn Hotel and Golf course for most of the land. The remainder was acquired by purchasing private residences that were generally located along Paradise Avenue. While some owners sold early on, others held out. This resulted in numerous legal actions between the various parties. In the end, the site acquired totaled 215 acres (870,000 m²).
The historic Desert Inn Golf Course was rebuilt while the hotel was being constructed. The new course, the only one on the Las Vegas Strip, was designed by Steve Wynn and Tom Fazio, who previously worked together on the Shadow Creek Golf Club, also in Las Vegas. Called the "Wynn Golf and Country Club", use of the course is restricted to hotel guests at a cost of $500 per round.
The initial commercial for the hotel aired in some local spots during the 2005 Super Bowl. The commercial stands out in that Wynn stood atop the edge of his tall building (with a helicopter a few feet away).
Wynn Las Vegas opened on April 28, 2005, Wynn's wife's birthday.
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Wynn Las Vegas is one of the tallest buildings in Las Vegas, towering 50 stories over the Strip. It is located at Las Vegas Boulevard South and Sands Avenue, across from the Fashion Show Mall.
The 2,716 rooms range in size from 620 square feet (58 m²) to the villas at 7,000 square feet (650 m²) with a 111,000 ft² (10,200 m²) casino. A convention center with 223,000 ft² (20,700 m²) of space is also available.
In a departure from the previous trend of providing free sidewalk attractions to draw in customers, the Wynn Las Vegas is constructed so that visitors must enter the site to view the free attractions. The main feature is large, flat waterfall behind the mountain, running into a small 3 acre (12,000 m²) lake, both of which have images displayed on them to produce a unique show on the hour, every hour, starting at some point in the afternoon.
The resort holds much of Wynn's considerable art collection, which was largely removed from the Bellagio following the merger of MGM Grand Inc. and Mirage Resorts in 2000. The collection, which focuses primarily on 19th and 20th-century works by European and American artists, includes masterpieces by Édouard Manet, Andy Warhol, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and Paul Gauguin, among others. The centerpiece of the collection is "Le Rêve," the Pablo Picasso portrait that was the resort's original namesake. Wynn reportedly purchased the painting for $42 million, one of the highest prices ever paid for a Picasso. The collection was on display at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno while the Wynn Las Vegas was being constructed and was installed in the resort shortly before it was opened.
The property features 26 retail outlets in 76,000 square feet (7,000 m²) of space, one of which is a Ferrari-Maserati dealership, an art gallery, and two wedding chapels. There are also 18 restaurants and bars.
Nightclubs are an important part of the resort, as are theaters housing several production shows.
The first production show is set in a new 1 million gallon water-oriented theatre where no seat is more than 40 feet (12 m) from the stage. This production, entitled Le Rêve (the working name of the resort project), was created by Franco Dragone. Dragone was a director of Cirque du Soleil and creator of Céline Dion's A New Day at Caesars Palace. Although not a Cirque du Soleil production, Le Rêve shares many of the characteristics usually associated with a Cirque du Soleil show.
A third theater will be built to house a Las Vegas production of Spamalot, a Tony Award-winning comedic musical based on the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, scheduled to open in 2007.
This hotel boasts (according to Wired News) that it
- provides the world's largest distribution of HDTV, sent into the rooms without individual antennae via high-speed Cat-6 ethernet cables
- offers the biggest use of VOIP technology for hotel phones
- is among the first casinos to install computer chips inside gambling chips to detect counterfeiting
- is the first in the industry to combine the room key and the casino frequent-player card in the same piece of plastic.
- at the time it went up, was the largest privately funded construction project in the nation. (By contrast, the budget for whatever will rise at ground zero in New York is $1 billion less than the cost of Wynn)
- sits on 215 acres once occupied by the storied Desert Inn Hotel, where then-owner Howard Hughes shut himself in for years in the 1970s. |
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