The Porte-Cochère Problem: Why the Casino Entrance Keeps Getting Bigger

Fifteen stories in this archive stop to describe a porte-cochère. None of them treat it as a canopy. They treat it as the moment the property makes its argument — and, on a renovation, as the single most expensive thing to be wrong about.

The clearest statement of the principle comes from the 2009 report on Oaklawn in Hot Springs, Arkansas: Whether that is a porte cochere or not, the access, the first impression of the facility is one of the most important statements. Note the hedge. The designer is not defending the canopy. He is defending the arrival sequence, of which the canopy is only the visible part.

Why it is never simply a canopy

A porte-cochère resolves four things at once, and the four pull against each other.

• Grade. The drive has to meet the door at the door's level. On the Chumash renovation covered in Making History, that meant surgery on the ground itself: a camel's hump in the parking area was removed and the lot lowered, which is what finally allowed what the designer calls a clear and understandable route to the entrances — and an elegant canopy over it.
• Lane count. Valet, self-park drop-off, bus, rideshare and ADA loading all want the curb. Boutique Brands describes a connector structure built as the nucleus of a property, even functioning as the main entry lobby for hotel guests from a new two-lane porte cochere. Two lanes is a decision, not a default.
• Distance to the thing the guest came for. The Cromwell, reported in Good Bones, is the extreme case: guests pull off of Flamingo Boulevard, drive a very short distance into our porte cochere, walk 10 to 15 feet to their front desk, walk in, again, another 10 to 15 to the elevator, straight to their room. That is a property deliberately designed so the arrival does not pass through the casino.
• Identity. Which is where the money goes.

The renovation trap

The canopy is structure. It has footings, it carries a roof, and on a full-service property it usually holds up something else. That makes it the piece of the entrance sequence a refresh budget cannot casually relocate — so refreshes attack its surface instead.

Golden Transformation, on the Nugget in Laughlin, is the pattern in one sentence: the porte-cochère has been transformed from grim to glowing with a bank of shimmering gold overhead lights. The geometry did not move. The ceiling plane did all the work. Compare the treatment in Boutique Brands, where the columns at the porte cochere were articulated with custom metal enclosures with LED pin lights that illuminate the columns from within — again, cladding and light on structure that stayed exactly where it was.

When the geometry does have to change, it is rarely a cosmetic call. Metro-Gaming, on the Cosmopolitan, records a senior vice president at the Friedmutter Group saying the decision of how to deal with the porte-cochère wasn't a difficult one — which, read in context, means the site had already made it. Urban infill sites usually have.

Three ways the archive resolves the identity problem

Make the canopy the theme. The strongest examples are tribal. Telling A Story describes an entrance the guest reads before the building: You enter a whimsical porte cochere, which is an abstract form of an eagle about to take off. Design by Evolution takes the same route through water — the symbols are incorporated into the water feature at the porte cochere — and Signature Style uses the feature to carry landscape into architecture, with waterfalls imagined in the water features framing the porte cochere, adding further depth and integration of nature. See also the archive's water feature and themed design indexes.

Make the canopy the light. The roundtable in The Brave New World of Design and Construction notes that YWS devised a light as architecture concept for the Rio porte-cochère. On a property where the canopy is the only surface visible from the road at night, that is the whole exterior budget in one place.

Give it away. Some properties decide the canopy is not the front door at all. At Ocean in Atlantic City, described in Best of the Boardwalk, the porte cochere is located just off the Boardwalk and is accessed through an underground garage — the arrival is deliberately subordinated to the beach. At CityCenter, Art for Art's Sake records Nancy Rubins' explosion of small boats set near the Vdara canopy, where the art, not the structure, is what the guest remembers.

What to take from fifteen projects

Across the archive the porte-cochère behaves like a hinge: it is the last piece of site work and the first piece of the interior, and it is priced as neither. Three habits show up in the projects that got it right.

1. Fix the grade before designing the canopy. Every arrival problem in these stories that required demolition was a grade problem first.
2. Decide the lane count from the operating model, not the elevation. A two-lane canopy at a hotel-led property and a two-lane canopy at a bus-led local casino are different buildings.
3. Put the identity in the ceiling plane and the columns. They are the surfaces a refresh can reach, and — as Laughlin and the property in Boutique Brands both show — they carry the whole impression on their own.

Everything else in the archive on this element is collected at Design Index: porte-cochère.