The
Bestest Hotel in the World
A man who is going blind builds a palace for
all to see.
Night & Day, November
1998
Let me ask you a question’, says Steve
Wynn, the 56-year-old man who seems to run Las
Vegas. ‘If we could build a hotel that,
regardless of the century, was clearly, unequivocally,
overwhelmingly the most lovely, elegant, beautiful
hotel ever built in the history of the planet,
a place where even the people in Johannesburg
or Singapore would say, “It’s a wonderment”,
well, wouldn’t that be something?’
It would. Unfortunately, Steve Wynn has built
Bellagio, a spectacular impersonation of the
greatest hotel on the planet. It is the greatest
hotel on the planet
as designed by people who have never been out of Las Vegas, or the greatest
hotel on the Planet of Vegas. It is also, at $1.6 billion (£965 million),
the most ludicrously expensive hotel ever, with the only casino in the world
containing $300 million (£180 million) worth of Impressionist art.
Even though it may not quite live up to Steve Wynn’s dream, Bellagio,
which opened last month after five years of building, will only enhance the
reputation and wealth of the most extravagant hotelier in America (his greatest
rival is Donald Trump). Wynn already owns several other huge hotels in Las
Vegas – the Golden Nugget, Treasure Island, the Mirage – all of
which are essentially casinos with bedrooms, and which earn his organisation
approximately $700 million every year.
But Bellagio is something else, the ultimate 3,025-room pleasure palace in
a city where no one has yet been able to locate the dimmer switch. Bellagio
is designed to offer visitors everything they would normally associate with
Las Vegas – screaming slot machines, a hundred different ways to lose
money on green baize, all-you-can-eat buffets, a brain-haemorrhaging show – but
at Bellagio it is coated with a varnish of European culture. At Bellagio, named
after a small Italian village Wynn chanced upon on holiday, more always equals
more. It costs more to stay at the Bellagio than most places on the Las Vegas
strip – about $150-$850 depending on room size and season – but
for that you get a bigger atrium, more flowers, a wider range of tat in the
gift shop, and a much more fanatical and over-inflated owner.
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