The Regional Casino Is a Different Building
Destination resorts get the photographs and set the vocabulary. Most of the archive's projects are regional, and almost every rule from Las Vegas inverts when you get there.
The casino design vocabulary was written on the Las Vegas Strip, for buildings that compete with each other along one street and are visited on purpose, once, for several days. Most casinos are nothing like that. They are visited repeatedly by people who live nearby, and they compete with a casino ninety minutes away in another state.
Gaming stays in front
The clearest statement of the difference is in Design Q&A: Future Shock: Gaming will continue to be the most important revenue generator in regional casinos, and will always need to be convenient and prominent.
Convenient and prominent is the opposite of the resort strategy, where the floor is reached through retail and the guest is deliberately routed past other things. A regional customer with two hours does not want a journey. Put the machines where they can be reached from the car.
The market is defined by what surrounds it
Regional casino design begins with a map of other people's jurisdictions. Doing More With Less gives two cases in two sentences: Revel in Atlantic City, where competition from surrounding jurisdictions made the situation even worse
; and Bossier City, where Margaritaville was the first new property to open in more than a dozen years, but also in a market that had been hard hit by competition from Oklahoma Indian casinos poaching its principal Dallas market.
The positive case is the same logic inverted. Finding an Alternate Path: The great thing for Oklahoma is not having competition from Texas, Arkansas and Missouri.
A regional property's catchment is drawn by drive time and by legislation, and both can change. Design that assumes today's map is design with a short life.
Amenity, not spectacle
Hard Hit saw the consequence early: Since virtually all business and tourism destinations have some form of gaming close by, everyone must offer something above and beyond gaming to survive and thrive.
And, crucially, that the something has to work harder per square foot: We already see operators and designers trying to design "flex" space that can be used for two purposes at different times of the day.
Flex space is the regional answer to a resort's specialisation. A destination resort can afford a room that is a nightclub and nothing else. A regional property needs the same room to be a bingo hall, a concert venue and a banquet space in one week.
Finding an Alternate Path asks the sizing question directly — Are there enough parking garages and food court venues to satisfy the market?
— which is the right question and rarely the one that gets asked before construction.
Familiarity is the product
The single best articulation of a regional design goal in the archive is Hometown Racino, on a property in a simple square building
that gives off vibes of something rich and exciting, but also comfortable, so that people are starting to identify it as their 'hometown' casino.
Rich and exciting but comfortable, in a square building, on a regional budget. A destination resort is trying to be unforgettable; a regional casino is trying to be somebody's regular. Those briefs produce different buildings, and copying the first while funding the second is the commonest failure in the archive.
Diversification beyond the floor
Where tribal operators dominate a regional market, the archive shows the business widening rather than the floor growing. Finding an Alternate Path: The Cherokee Nation has charged into the forefront of the outlet shop era and the Chickasaw Nation, which flourishes with 18 casinos, also owns racetracks and a chocolate factory.
Eighteen casinos is a portfolio, and a portfolio is designed differently from a property: standardised components, repeatable details, a house kit of parts. See designing for a tribal owner.
What travels from Las Vegas, and what does not
| Resort logic | Regional logic |
|---|---|
| Route the guest past everything | Shortest path from car to floor |
| Specialised venues | Flex space, multiple dayparts |
| Spectacle at arrival | Legibility and comfort at arrival |
| Stay of several nights | Repeat visits of a few hours |
| Competes with neighbours on the same street | Competes with a jurisdiction across a state line |
What does travel is the craft: ceiling as wayfinding, pattern at the right scale, light that can be tuned. Those are cheap relative to their effect, which is precisely why they belong on a regional budget.