Wynn Las Vegas Magazine by MODERN LUXURY

Wynn Las Vegas - 2016 - Issue 1 - Spring+Summer

Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas

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30 Steve Wynn increased his stake in the Golden Nugget in 1973, becoming the youngest casino owner in Las Vegas. above: Wynn started in Downtown Vegas with the Frontier and the Golden Nugget, followed by the Mirage, Treasure Island, and Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip. Wynn Las Vegas (right) opened in 2005, Wynn Macau in 2006, and Encore in 2008. By the time Wynn got his start after having graduated from college, he'd experienced the glamour of Las Vegas and Miami, he explains. "I came away from those experi- ences, when my father died, having inherited a bingo operation next to a concrete-block tobacco warehouse in southern Maryland. I have the Fontainebleau in my head, and the only thing I've got going for me is the bingo. So I'm hustling to get the bingo going so I can go to greener pastures and be a developer. The casinos have allowed me to spend more money on fancy destination hotels than I ever thought would be possible. And then I had the great luck and privilege to do it during the golden age of Las Vegas." In fact, the Wynn ethos was born decades before he built the Mirage in 1989, which, at a cost of $630 million, was the most expen- sive hotel built to date—and credited with changing the Las Vegas landscape. "The building of a brand was a side effect of a sim- ple observation I made when I was younger," he says. "I never wanted to be in a business where you were selling price, because the only place to go is down. Instead, I opted to sell experience. And when you're selling experience, price is irrelevant as long as you keep the promise." photography by Quade/ullstein bild via get t y images (golden nugget ); robert a. van het hof/shut terstock.com (w ynn l as vegas) As owner of the Golden Nugget in the 1970s, he says, "I made it a four-star place. I was ill-suited to [Downtown's] Fremont Street, so I tried to remake Fremont Street to suit me." As a result, on his watch the Golden Nugget made more money than the other Fremont Street casino hotels combined. Fast-forward to the 1990s, and the Mirage gave hoteliers permission to spend, Wynn says. "Instead of building little $150 million hotels, they could spend north of half a billion, and everybody started doing it." After opening the Bellagio in 1998, Wynn's name may have become synonymous with luxury to hotel cognoscenti, but he was reti- cent to put it on the side of a building once the time came to name his new property prior to its 2005 opening. "It seemed egocentric," he recalls; besides, he wanted to name the hotel after a famous Picasso painting he owned, Le Rêve ("The Dream"). He enlisted advertising guru Peter Arnell, who polled Vegas regulars for weeks and came up with this pronounce- ment, Wynn says. "'My answer to you, Steve, is that you can call it "Le Rêve," but you'd damn well better say it's the guy who built the Mirage and Bellagio and it means "The Dream." And for my money, that's too much information.'"

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