Luxury Travel Advisor - November 2007 - (Page 66) COVER STORY THE 600-ROOM WYNN MACAU debuted in 2006 (Grand Deluxe Room shown); plans are underway to add gardens to existing suites. POOLSIDE CABANAS at Wynn Las Vegas (above) are climate-controlled, fully furnished and provide guests with their own personal wait staff. ise of my three prior hotels). The walk-in is based upon what the word of mouth is about what’s inside. What do you care about the people looking in from the Strip?’” For Wynn, this realization was an epiphany. “I came to the conclusion that I’d had it wrong for 27 years,” he says. “There’s something more fetching than a volcano or fountains that dance to Italian singers or pirate ships that sink. What’s more fetching and more compelling is mystery. Build a fence and any kid worth a damn will climb over it. When you put these bushes in front of these mansions in Bel Air, everybody wants to know what’s on the other side!” he says. And so, gone was his long-standing strategy of luring guests in from the street with a dramatically themed extravaganza. Moving forward, Steve Wynn was only going build his hotels from the inside out, not the outside in. “This 180-degree shift was the biggest single moment in my career,” he says. “I’ll never design a hotel from the outside looking in again. It’s all about what you do inside. It’s all about the quality of your experience inside regardless of what you’re doing—walking, shopping, eating or going to the spa.” Now keenly focused on interiors, Wynn filled the resort with light and plants. “Everywhere you go in Wynn, there’s a skylight,” he says. More importantly, the hotelier pondered how to make his huge property a luxury experience that visitors could escape to and not feel as if they were in a vast building. “The bigger you are, the less human scale you can have. That’s why boutiques are charming,” he notes. The first step to that solution was eliminating the strategy of making the casino the center of the resort experience. “I was going to trust people to find the casino,” says Wynn. “People come here for vacation. I can’t give them that kind of experience if every moment they’re coming upon yet another slot machine. So I separated the restaurants architecturally and emotionally from the casino so you can take a breath before you go to eat Japanese food, so that you could reset your emotional clock. I also did that with Bartolotta and Sugar & Ice and SW Steakhouse and Tableau and the Country Club and Alex. They’re deliberately away from the casino in their own environments, which is one of the reasons people stay there longer and gamble longer and eat more often, and why our casino revenue is so high,” he says. Along those same lines, Wynn also developed “neighborhoods” within the resort to establish a subliminal sense of comfort. His model for such a plan? New York City. “Here’s a city that’s as big and sprawling as any, and it has every choice under the sun. Yet because of the neighborhoods, there’s intimacy. You have Chinatown, Tribeca, Harlem, the Upper East Side, Broadway, the Upper West Side, and there’s a big park in the middle, but each of those neighborhoods has size and scale 66 LUXURY TRAVEL ADVISOR | November 2007
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