A Bed and a Bathroom Is No Longer Enough

The editorial in All Things Being Equal announces the change in one sentence: Bob Kelly gives us a peek inside the casino hotel room and explains why just a bed and a bathroom are no longer enough.

That is a commercial statement, not an aesthetic one. A room that is only a bed competes on price. A room that is a reason to book competes on rate — and on a casino property, rate is one of the few numbers not set by the floor.

The mock-up comes first

The most instructive process story in the archive is in Encore! Encore!, and it describes a room designed as a product before it was designed as architecture. In Macau, we had decided we wanted to develop a suite in a typical room bay — that is, a suite fitted inside the standard structural module, so the tower does not have to change. The device that made it work: In this partition, we put a large flat-screen TV that you could swivel and watch from both sides of the partition.

And then the part that matters: After Wynn and the rest of the team saw the mockup of the Macau suite, they decided it had to be implemented in Encore as well.

A physical mock-up, reviewed, approved, and then transplanted to another property in another country. On a tower of a thousand identical bays, the room is a mass-produced object, and the prototype is the design decision.

The bay is the constraint, and the opportunity

Everything in a casino hotel room is downstream of the structural bay and the riser location. The Encore approach — fit the better product into the existing module — is the difference between an upgrade and a redesign. Where the bay has to change, the tower changes, and the cost is no longer a room cost.

This is also why suite conversions are such good value on an existing property. Suite Deal records ten suites created inside the main tower of the El Cortez for a $250,000 investment, with the observation that earlier renovations there have made a huge difference for a reasonable investment.

The view became part of the product

Where a property has an outlook, the room is designed around it. Best of the Boardwalk: Floor-to-ceiling windows in all the 1,898 hotel rooms — from an Ocean Room to a View Suite — offer sprawling views of the sea. Power Trio places its suites in the Octavius tower overlooking the recently renovated Garden of Gods pool area — the pool deck sells the room and the room sells the pool deck. See the pool went up.

The irony is worth stating: the casino floor is the part of the building designed to exclude the outside world, and the rooms above it increasingly sell nothing but the view. Both are deliberate. See no windows, no clocks.

Scale does not decide feel

Encore! Encore! poses the question every large hotel faces — how do you get a bunch of small rooms, yet enjoy the energy of a large casino? — and notes that a property with more than 2,700 rooms and suites nonetheless had a boutique feel. The variable is not room count; it is how many rooms share a lift lobby, a corridor and a check-in. See what boutique actually specifies.

Rooms are a specialist discipline

The firm profiles make it plain that guest rooms are commissioned as their own scope. BLT Architects' hospitality work covers architectural and interior design of guest rooms, food service, retail, conference and fitness centers across boutique hotels, extended stay and suites-type operations to full-service business and convention hotels. YWS lists the Treasure Island Suites and Planet Hollywood guestrooms remodels as distinct projects. One of a Kind lists the Red Rooms and suites for Paris Las Vegas, a series of contemporary guest rooms and suites at the Rio in a portfolio otherwise full of nightclubs.

Rooms remodels appear on portfolios as repeat business because that is what they are: on a mature property the rooms cycle every seven to ten years while the casino floor cycles on a different clock entirely.

Five things that decide a casino room's rate

1. The bay — what can be fitted without touching structure.
2. The bathroom — the most expensive square metres in the room and the first thing guests judge.
3. The view, and whether the tower orientation was ever designed around it.
4. The technology, which dates fastest and is replaced most often.
5. The prototype. If nobody built one, the tower is being designed on drawings alone.