Wynn Las Vegas Magazine by MODERN LUXURY

Wynn - 2015 - Issue 1 - Spring+Summer

Wynn Magazine - Las Vegas

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photography by barbara kraft N o one relishes a back-to-the- drawing-board moment like Steve Wynn. When he began conceptu- alizing Wynn Las Vegas, he knew that his ideas would need to stand up against some of the most successful on the Strip: his own. So in approaching his design, he dug all the way down to instinct. "When I bought the Desert Inn and was stand- ing looking at the land that is now Wynn," he says, "I knew that I would have to compete with the first hotel on the Strip that had not been con- strained by budget. With Mirage, I'd had to watch my money; I'd built a $600 million hotel in a $200 million town. But by the time we got around to Bellagio, the town was established and I tripled it up. So now I was going to compete with one of my own hotels that was a no-budget job on a big piece of property with a primary location, and I thought, Well, what are we going to do here?" He examined the realities of the land he was standing on. In 2005, some would say that a prop- erty that far north on the Strip could only be a secondary location. But not Wynn, whose philoso- phy is that the hotel makes the location, not the other way around: "The hotel is the destination. The Dunes went broke where Bellagio was—twice." Wynn had already designed a tropics-themed casino with a spewing volcano and an elaborate paean to a town on Lake Como, and it would be easy for a less progressive hotelier, faced with designing another hotel, to get mired in what the next special effect would be. Instead, Wynn rejected every preconceived notion one might have about a Las Vegas hotel. "I said to myself, I need something that resonates with human aspi- ration. And I laughed a little bit at this little bit of personal dialogue and then said, That's the right way to think of it, Steve. But what does that mean?" For Wynn, it meant going back almost to the primordial soup. "We had to get hold of the pri- mary sources that resonate with people," he explains. "Why do we love sunny days or hate dark cloudy days? Why do people love being near the water? The truest way to create a des- tination that people will want to return to is by linking it with the human desires for light and air and water that transcend design. Now you're get- ting to the nitty-gritty. That is how you resonate with human aspiration." Every new design is an opportunity to learn from a past project, says DuRuyter Butler, Executive Vice President of Architecture for Wynn Design and Development. In this case, Wynn quizzed from top: One of Steve Wynn's favorite views, on the Esplanade at Wynn; Steve Wynn. 30 Wynn STEVE WyNN

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