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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