Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas
Issue link: http://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/436994
opened Encore "right in the darkest cavern of the recession," he recalls. As he spent more and more on grander and more exciting attrac- tions for Las Vegas visitors, a winning pattern emerged. Each time, his resorts made more in nongaming revenue than in gaming revenue. People wanted a grand hotel—and were willing to spend for the full experience. Call it a formula if you will, but Wynn knows what luxury resort visitors want. Building a new resort, he says, "is about giving people a chance to live big. If you give it to them, you're going to be okay. If you forget it, you're just a passenger on a bumpy road of economic cycles." What is keeping him up nights right now is the excitement of building a palatial resort in an urban area that is not the Las Vegas Strip, at a time, he says, when you can justifiably say that the era of the grand hotel is over. "Imagine the fun of that!" he adds with a smile. "Hotel rooms, spa, shops, restaurants as fanciful as those in these hotels up and down the Strip"—the kind you won't see in urban areas these days, with their mixed-use towers filled with offices and condos. As for that entrance outside Boston, Wynn describes an all-glass porte cochere. Drive up and you will encounter a massive glass-enclosed garden; above it, massive floral designs of Ferris wheels, hot-air balloons, a windmill from Holland, a 25-foot Fabergé egg, all soaring into a sky- lit lobby. Even the escalators move differently, curved and diverging "so they're tangent in the middle. One group is going up and one is coming down, and they touch each other in the middle." Between the escalators, a glass elevator ascends over the crowds and the gardens, "because I want all the people to know that they're not in Kansas anymore," he laughs. And down the hall (for those who really come for it), gaming rooms justify the return of the grand hotel—very different, he explains, from the casino floor that serves as a resort's nexus, forcing everyone who arrives to traverse it. The kind of fantasy he describes, I suggest, provides human theater on a grand scale and escapism at its best. But Wynn counters that it's change, not escapism, he offers—perhaps a fine distinction, but an important one. "If you broaden the use of the word 'escapism' as wide as you're trying to do, I guess it works to the extent that people come to Las Vegas to party, to live big, to raise hell, to indulge themselves in ways that they wouldn't do at home," he says. Parasols seem to float upward from their perch at the Parasol Down bar, facing the Lake of Dreams. photograph by barbara kraft 28 Wynn STEVE Wynn