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COVER STORY The Cosmopolitan is the property that has finally revived the old Vegas rule that supply can create its own demand, that a new resort can deliver a snort of adrenaline to a boulevard in need of constant reinvention. There’s little doubt about where the place to be is in Vegas on a Saturday night lately. If it’s early, it’s at Vesper Bar, where you sip a Moscow Mule and watch the beautiful people check in while you check out one of the floor-to-ceiling video art installations—perhaps the one of the couple dancing that could be a dreamy scene in Mad Men. If it’s a little later, it’s small plates at Jaleo, with its self-proclaimed “world’s best gin and tonic” and the mosaic behind the bar that’s like a Vegas Botticelli. Or still later, at the Chandelier, where a woman in a dress made completely of feathers is eyed until the next spectacle wanders up the curving staircase. By 2 a.m., the place to be is Marquee, where the soundtrack will be the best cutting edge DJ from Germany, and the music won’t stop until after sun-up Sunday. It’s all at the Cosmopolitan, which is making broad swaths of the rest of the Strip feel like the home of Orange County mooks, Tommy Bahama nobodies and fanny-pack hordes. And Cosmopolitan has the crowds and the room rates to prove its coolness quotient. On an average weekend night, Marquee hosts four to five thousand. Scott Conant, celebrity chef at Scarpetta, tells me he has done 400 covers on some nights and had to send people away. As of mid-May, the weekend asking rate for June was 20 $501 per night—tops in the city. “The Cosmopolitan definitely did create a buzz and continues to maintain it,” says Robert LaFleur, an analyst with Hudson Securities. The Cosmopolitan is the property, like the Mirage, Hard Rock and Palms in earlier times, that has finally revived the old Vegas rule that supply can create its own demand, that a new resort can deliver a snort of adrenaline to a boulevard in need of constant reinvention. “Vegas needed a win, and this is a win,” LaFleur adds. The only problem? The place lost money in the first quarter. A lot of money. And it cost $4 billion to build. And therein lies the challenge, not just for the Cosmopolitan, but for the rest of the Strip, as well. The newest generation of upmarket travelers has its own tribal tastes and mores, which raises the question: Can what’s cool now also be what’s profitable? Before we get to that question, let’s explore what precisely it is about the Cosmopolitan that makes it so different than everything else. Think in terms of Hollywood movies, of the same product chasing the same demographic. Then along comes something fresh that appeals to a different crowd. Like, say, Black Swan, which, even before Oscar time, had delivered a whopping 1,323 percent return to investors. COSMOPOLITAN BY THE NUMBERS Soft Opening: Dec. 15, 2010 Groundbreaking: Oct. 25, 2005 Initial cost estimate: $1.8 billion (Oct. 2005) Final Cost: $3.9 billion Land: 8.7 acres between CityCenter and Bellagio Strip frontage: 335 feet Permanent jobs: About 5,000 Rooms: 2,995 Rooms with terraces: About 2,200 Casino size: 100,000 square feet Restaurants: 12 Bars and lounges: 4 Nightclubs: 1 Retail space: 36,000 square feet Convention space: 150,000 square feet Spa: 43,000 square feet Pools: 3 If the rest of the Strip can sometimes feel like the same movie, the Cosmopolitan is Black Swan. The film business is an apt analogy, and not just because Cosmo denizens are likely fans of Swan director Darren Aronofsky. David Rockwell and his firm the Rockwell Group, which designed the Cosmopolitan, has done sets for theater productions such as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Catch Me If You Can as well as the Oscars. He once described approaching his projects as unwritten scripts. I asked him what the script at the Cosmopolitan says. He says his goal was something new that celebrates, in an age when so many of us stare at screens all day, both three-dimensional spectacle and dynamic interaction with friends and strangers. Now listen to how the design dovetails with the Cosmopolitan’s marketing strategy, as explained by Lisa Marchese, senior vice president of brand marketing: “People trade in social currency. We wanted them to have stories to take home.” This may sound like a bunch of pseudo-intellectual blather, but it’s hard to deny that what our resorts must do is create memories, stories that people tell themselves and their friends. If they don’t have an interesting story to tell back at work on Monday morning, there’s a decent | 13 JUNE 2011 |